The growing awareness of the cultural meaning of (Olympic) sports venues is reflected in the fact that more and more stadiums are being declared as cultural heritage sites to save them from demolition (Kiuri & Teller 2015). This is also mirrored in academic publications. Based on pioneering work on the relocation of stadiums from the centre to the periphery and its impact on local fans and their ‘sense of place’ (Bale 1991, 1993, 1995), recent volumes are dedicated to stadiums as cultural heritage sites (Waterton & Watson 2015), as places of (visible) political conflicts (Alpan et al. 2023), and as meaningful places of European commemorative culture (Hüser et al. 2022). Another focus is the analysis of commercial stadium names as critical toponymies and their evaluation by (local) fans (Vuolteenaho et al. 2019; Gerhardt et al. 2021) who fear the loss of a (linguistic) identity marker (Koch & Gautier 2022), as not only the historically evolved landscape, but also the contemporary (linguistic) appearance changes sustainably (Vuolteenaho & Berg 2009). As part of the research project DISCLOSE (2022-2024), our contribution joining the congress themes of 1) commercial names … and 2) identity and naming …, seeks to find out which factors influence the naming of stadiums and how fans from Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Romania evaluate the naming of ‘their’ stadiums. The theoretical framework is a three-dimensional socio-discursive model (Bach et al. 2022) which is tested by means of a web-scraped data set (~2,500 names). In addition, an online survey will be conducted to contextualise these results. Preliminary results confirm that the language family and category, the league affiliation, and the year of construction are salient variables. Fan acceptance is determined by the sponsor’s image. Overall, the phenomenon of stadium naming oscillates between (necessary) commodification and (wishful) identity-stabilising cultural sustainability.