Does anything say lack of success quite like “Deutsche Bank Park”?

Once upon a time, long, long ago, when air travel between New York and continental Europe was possible, we resided for a spell in the city of Frankfurt am Main. As regular readers of this blog will know, we were not overly fond of it. That being said, there were matters Hessian we came to appreciate: Apfelwein, Rippchen, the local wines, the regular fests, the high-speed trains that quickly whisked you away to better places—and the local XI, Eintracht Frankfurt.

As a consequence of this last, the following appeared in my Facebook feed yesterday.

That’s right: You might have thought that, after the fines, client development costs, fines, client defaults, fines, gut renovations, fines, severance checks and fines, combined with whatever it has to spend on compliance improvements and subpoena responses, and the fact it isn’t making any, that Deutsche Bank wouldn’t have any extra money lying around to spend on a vanity project, if you can call putting your name on the home stadium of a perennially underachieving mid-table soccer team vain—let alone €5.4 million a year for the next seven years (assuming it lives that long). That’s almost €2 million a year more than similarly-but-less-troubled Commerzbank, whose name graced the former Waldstadion for the last 15 years, paid for the privilege, and certainly more than Commerz was willing to pay to continue it. But we guess you can’t really put a price on repeatedly cucking your local rivals.