By John Rizzardini, FiveThirtyEight
The Cleveland baseball and Washington football teams are both embarking on the daunting tasks of renaming their historic sports franchises. After years of backlash against racially insensitive names and mascots, both teams have a chance to start fresh with new identities. But though their name changes were announced in 2020, neither franchise will implement its new permanent name until at least 2022. Why will it take so long?
Selecting a new name for an existing sports franchise sounds like a fun exercise. How hard can it be? Everyone has named a child, a dog, a boat or their Twitter handle. You corral a bunch of creative folks in a room with a big whiteboard, sip a few cocktails and brainstorm. Everyone’s brimming with ideas and positive energy, ready to collaborate on this epic creative process. Someone will come up with the right name, a moment of epiphany when everyone shouts, “That’s it!”
The reality is, the process to find the right name for a sports team is grueling, onerous and tedious, and it comes with career peril. After an NHL expansion team was granted to Seattle in 2018, I helped shepherd an exhaustive process that carved out the Kraken brand from a list of 1,200 prospective names. The Kraken name launched 19 months after the franchise was approved by the league.