Gunners aim for £110m in name game

ARSENAL are set to smash all records for the naming rights for the new stadium at Ashburton Grove with plans to sign a backer for more than £110m.

The boss of the specialist Los Angeles marketing agency brought in to find a sponsor for the £357m development in north London believes the global pull of a top European-based football club will make the rights to name the 60,000-seat stadium more valuable than any previous deal pulled off in the US.

Jeff Knapple, chief executive of naming rights sponsorship agency Envision, told the Evening Standard: 'We think this is the standard against which all future naming rights will be measured. There is more interest in this than in anything we have been involved in before.'

Knapple believes Envision, hired last month by Arsenal, can strike a deal which will beat the previous record set in 2000 when Reliant Energy signed a deal worth $10m (£5.4m) a year for 30 years to name the home of the American football team, the Houston Texans.

Arsenal are are set to move to their new home in 2006 and Envision has been charged with looking for a stadium sponsor.

Knapple said negotiations had not yet started but confirmed that likely sponsors would be in the financial, electronics/technology and automotive sectors. Talks with a telecoms firm would be ruled out because mobile firm O2 is the shirt sponsor of the Gunners. O2 said: 'We would certainly be prepared to consider it.'