I no longer used the carioca metro during the long months of the pandemic. When I took it over, at the end of last year, I had a surprise: the Botafogo station, one of the most important in the network, seemed to have changed its name to “Botafogo/Coca-Cola”! At first I thought it was a one-off promotional operation, but no: all the signs inside and outside the resort have been permanently modified! That’s his new name.
Station Botafogo/Coca-Cola
I am looking that up. The information has passed through the media, but in the midst of a critical period of the pandemic and very discreetly, without any detail, in complete opacity. In fact, the Brazilian consortium that manages the metro – bringing together public company pension funds and construction companies – must face an 80% collapse in traffic in 2020 and therefore financial difficulties. This agreement of naming right (“naming” in good French!) puts a little butter in the spinach. A little later, this consortium will also sell the majority of the capital of the Rio metro to an Arab sovereign fund.
I find it more difficult to understand the interest of Coca-Cola. Admittedly, their Brazilian head office is well located in Botafogo, on the edge of the bay, facing the Pain de Sucre, one of the most beautiful places in the world! But the brand has little need for notoriety or to improve its image in a country where it has been generously feeding entire generations of Brazilians for a long time – to the detriment of the guarana local, tastier for my taste but just as sweet.
So, is it to be a good carioca citizen? Or to forget the dietary damage of their flagship product? Or is it the fruit of a conjunction of personal and political interests of which Brazil has the secret? We will probably never know, any more than we know the duration or the amount of this naming operation.
In “futebol” too
This practice is obviously not new in Brazil. Until now, it concerned the stages of football (especially in São Paulo) and large theaters (also in Rio). Curiously not yet one of the stadiums in Rio, when it is easy to imagine that the prestigious Maracanã can stir up envy. Would there be a blockage, a taboo? As for the samba schools, which absolutely refuse to accept the sponsorship of commercial brands. A few years ago, Carioca politicians scuttled the plan to buy the Maracanã stadium by the French group Lagardère. The subject is sensitive here.
I don’t know if this naming from the Botafogo metro station is a world first. This is rare, it seems to me. Will it thrive here or elsewhere? It’s honestly quite weird. Can you imagine that one day there will be a Paris metro station “Gare d’Austerlitz/Courrier international”?