Getting someone’s name wrong in marketing copy can often be bad, but that’s perhaps even worse when the name in question is of the all-time leading goalscorer of the national team you’re trying to sell tickets for. That’s exactly what Levi’s Stadium (in Santa Clara, CA) appears to have done, though, calling famed Mexican striker Javier “Chicharito” Hernández (seen above in Los Angeles in a May 2018 warmup game ahead of the World Cup) “Hector Hernández” in a marketing email promoting tickets to the Mexico-Paraguay friendly at their stadium in March. Charles Wollin, who writes about soccer culture for SF Gate (a San Francisco Chronicle-affiliated site) and calls games for the USL League Two San Francisco City FC, pointed this out on Twitter:
Hey @LevisStadium who wrote this? To muck up the name of a country’s all-time leading goalscorer is unacceptable and shows you don’t care. For a stadium that hosted a soccer match as its first event, and does so year after year, this is tone deaf. 2026 is coming, grow up. 🇲🇽❤️⚽️ pic.twitter.com/xHV4c0IzRH
— Charles Wollin (@cwollin) January 25, 2019
Yeah, that’s not great. And it’s just the latest bad look for that stadium this week, with the Santa Clara County Assessment Appeals Board issuing a preliminary ruling that the NFL’s 49ers were paying too much in property taxes on that site and that the county has to pay them $36 million back, with $13 million of that coming from the Santa Clara Unified School District. A key part of that dispute was the 49ers arguing they only control the stadium 50 percent of the time, but while they only have primary booking rights for six months of the year (with the county having primary booking rights the remainder of the time), the county argued that the 49ers benefit from events they book outside of the NFL season. Oh, and speaking of non-NFL events, the Pac-12 exercised an opt-out clause in its championship game contract to look at moving that game to another venue than Levi’s for the 2020 season. So yeah, everything’s going swimmingly for that stadium.
[Charles Wollin on Twitter]
