By Sam Carp
While Everton’s departure from Goodison Park meant leaving behind a ground they had called home since 1892, it also presented an opportunity that doesn’t come around very often in English soccer.
As the Premier League side packed up and prepared to move two miles down the road to a 53,000-seater stadium on the banks of the River Mersey, the Toffees needed a name for their new home, creating the possibility of securing a naming rights partner for the stadium.
Some clubs wouldn’t dare change the identity of a stadium that has been part of their fans’ matchday rituals for decades. However, the past 20 years have seen several Premier League sides find sponsors for new venues whose names aren’t yet etched in the team’s history, with grounds like the Emirates, the Etihad and the Amex all now part of the English soccer vernacular.
Even so, landing a stadium sponsor on the right terms is no guarantee, particularly in Europe, and recent times have seen several Premier League clubs try and fail to sell the naming rights to their new venues.
That didn’t prove to be the case for Everton, whose UK£750 million venue at Bramley-Moore Dock was officially renamed Hill Dickinson Stadium in May as part of a long-term agreement with the Liverpool-headquartered commercial law firm. The deal is reportedly worth UK£10 million annually over the next decade, locking in significant commercial revenue for the club for years to come.
Everton’s search for a naming rights partner ramped up in September 2022, when they appointed US-based Elevate as the sponsorship sales agency for the stadium, effectively leaving just under three years to find a sponsor before Premier League soccer kicked off at the venue.
The sales process coincided with a period of uncertainty for the club, including two points deductions for financial fair play (FFP) breaches and a change of ownership, which saw American investors the Friedkin Group buy Everton from Farhad Moshiri in a deal reportedly worth more than UK£400 million.
Then there were the challenges that confront any rights holder trying to sell stadium naming rights in Europe. While sponsors in the US are well versed in 15-to-20-year contract terms, some brands might have balked at the minimum ten-year commitment Everton were seeking from a potential partner.
Similarly, the American public is more accustomed with the commercialisation of stadium naming rights, whereas the prospect of seeing their team’s home ground renamed after a sponsor has typically been met with more resistance by sports fans in Europe.
In that context, it was crucial to educate brands about the nature of the Everton naming rights opportunity, which brings different benefits to an asset like a front-of-shirt sponsorship. Putting its name to a Premier League stadium would naturally deliver global media value for a partner, but Everton’s new home and its surrounding plaza also has ambitions of welcoming other sports, as well as music, business and cultural events.
That means the stadium offers a sponsor the ability to engage with a broader audience than soccer alone, as well as opportunities to leverage the venue for activities like employee engagement and B2B hospitality.
“When we talk about what that venue was and how we took it to market, it was [positioned as] a sports and entertainment destination where Premier League football was on the menu.”
Alex Scotcher
Elevate’s senior vice president of global partnerships
“But we’ve also got major touring artists, a 20,000-person capacity fan plaza in one of Europe’s most exciting, vibrant, burgeoning cities.
“We talked about it less as a football stadium, and more about a fully programmed 365 sports and entertainment destination. I think that meant that the conversations we had with brands and the stakeholders on the brand side were slightly different from who we’d typically engage with if we were representing a football club or pure footballing assets.”
Scotcher adds that there was a focus on positioning the stadium as a “community asset” for the city of Liverpool, enabling a potential partner to directly contribute to and associate itself with the ongoing regeneration of the city.
“The advantage was that the foundational tenant of the venue is Everton Football Club,” Scotcher continues. “I’ve never seen anybody do community and care about their community in the sports world as much as Everton. So I think that was the major point of differentiation for the foundational client.”
Some of the most high-profile naming rights deals in Europe in recent years have involved blue-chip brands like music streaming giant Spotify and insurance firm Allianz, while sectors such as financial services, airlines and automotive have historically been especially active in the stadium sponsorship space.
Some onlookers might therefore have been surprised when Everton unveiled their agreement with Hill Dickinson, a business with little previous investment in sports sponsorship that few people outside of the UK legal sector would have been exposed to before the partnership announcement.
Unlike some soccer leagues with a more domestic audience, Paul Kakhia, Elevate’s vice president of strategy and insights, points out that the addressable market of brands for a Premier League club “is infinite”.
However, rather than target categories that have proved profitable in the past, Elevate adopted a research-led, data-driven approach to narrow down the pool of potential sponsors to find a partner that aligned with Everton’s values, matched the club’s global ambitions, and whose objectives could be fulfilled through a venue sponsorship.
Brands were scored based on different quantitative and qualitative metrics, ranging from their financial performance and marketing spend to whether they had a CSR programme.
During that process, and as Elevate reached out to potential partners, a trend emerged.
“We started seeing in our data that brands with a local interest or who had something very important to them in Liverpool or the Northwest were sustaining the conversation a bit longer, they were more interested.”
Paul Kakhia
Elevate’s vice president of strategy and insights
“We saw that in all the metrics that we were seeing, so we doubled down on that. And that’s when category became a bit less important, because there was a lot of interest coming from the locality, the region.”
That insight ultimately led Elevate to Hill Dickinson, which first entered the conversation in mid-2024 before members of its leadership team visited for a stadium tour in January this year.
“There was this realisation that this is a new era,” recalls Jonathan Patterson, senior director of partnerships at Elevate, which has also secured the likes of Budweiser, Christopher Ward and Seat Unique as founding partners for Hill Dickinson Stadium.
“New ownership, new possibilities for the club, but also for Liverpool as a place for attracting the Ed Sheeran concerts, the Taylor Swift concerts, rugby league, obviously the Euros in 2028, and the full regeneration of the waterfront.”
Jonathan Patterson
Senior director of partnerships at Elevate
Several other brands were interested in becoming Everton’s stadium naming rights partner, including blue-chip businesses and UK financial services firms. But Patterson explains that “pulling at the thread” during the research process revealed a number of factors that made Hill Dickinson the right fit.
Indeed, Hill Dickinson made an operating profit of UK£57 million for the 2024 financial year, up from UK£45.6 million for the 12 months prior, meaning first and foremost that it had the capacity to invest in a stadium naming rights deal.
Equally as important was that Hill Dickinson’s roots are in Liverpool, where it was founded in 1810 originally as a maritime law firm, creating an authentic link between the company and the location of the new stadium on the site of the reclaimed Bramley-Moore Dock.
With more than 400 staff now based at its Liverpool headquarters, sponsoring the stadium offered Hill Dickinson an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to its local community. At the same time, the company has morphed into a global law firm with more than 1,000 employees across 12 offices in markets like Hong Kong and Singapore, marrying up with the international reach of the Premier League and other events due to be held at the venue.
According to Scotcher, who previously worked under the Friedkins as chief commercial officer at Italian side Roma, the narratives that Elevate were able to craft using that research then “dictated the categories” the agency engaged with.
“We felt like the storytelling capability was so good that it was worth some intelligent conversation with the leaders of Hill Dickinson,” he adds. “We started that, and we systematically worked with their marketing teams, with their leadership, and then that whole process ran all the way through to their partners and their board, providing the business case, the brand growth data and much more.
“Not least of all, it’s their community. A large number of people that work at Hill Dickinson live and exist and have their communities within the city of Liverpool and Merseyside. So there was a commitment to the city and the region that was so important to them and has been so important for years prior as well. That’s a really important part of the story too.”
Everton are now one of just six Premier League teams with a stadium naming rights sponsor, illustrating that their partnership with Hill Dickinson remains the exception rather than the rule in English soccer.
Selling a stadium naming rights position can become more challenging after a venue officially opens and fans and the media start referring to it by its unsponsored name. The most obvious point of comparison in recent times is Tottenham Hotspur, who remain without a partner for their state-of-the-art, 62,850-seater home in North London more than five years after their first game at the venue.
While it is likely to be many years before Everton supporters think as fondly of their new surroundings as they did of Goodison Park, announcing Hill Dickinson as the sponsor of the stadium three months before the 2025/26 Premier League campaign provided a decent runway for fans to get used to the name of the venue.
It also means that the identity of the stadium will have been planted in the public consciousness before Everton’s first competitive home game at the venue against Brighton & Hove Albion on Sunday.
“It’s universally understood in this game of doing naming rights that [the stadium name] has to be there when people go to their first matchday and start building those rituals and habits again,”
says Patterson.
“I think it was extremely important that for the very first matchday that people walk in, they’re calling it by the name that it’s intended to be, because then it’s much less of a shock to the system of changing again.
“That’s why the value compounds year on year. It just becomes more ingrained and more steeped in history.”
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