Farewell Alexander-Arnold, hello Trent: Why players switch to a single name

New York Times

18-06-2025

Trent Alexander-Arnold had his big first day as a Real Madrid player last week and it was the name he has chosen to carry on the back of his new white shirt that was a point of curiosity.
Where once there were 15 letters as a Liverpool and England player, now there are just five. Out with the Alexander-Arnold, in with the Trent.
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'Quite an easy explanation to that, to be honest,' Alexander-Arnold told reporters in his opening press conference in Madrid. 'I've always found when I travel to Europe that the whole name situation confuses a lot of people… People call me Arnold, Alexander, Alex, Trent. So I thought let's make it easy, Trent on the back, be known as Trent.'
A simple enough step — and some fans, commentators and pundits already refer to him as 'Trent' — but perhaps it was more considered than Alexander-Arnold made it out to be.
'It's a really simple thing but there'll be thinking behind it for people at Real Madrid, his advisors and the brands he's worked with, nudging the player towards this,' says Owen Laverty of Ear to the Ground, a creative sports agency.
'He's moving to a club with a long history under Florentino Perez of making sure that the players' brands absolutely shine through. It's an important part of Real Madrid. They leverage the power of the players' brands. They have that history but Alexander-Arnold's brand partners will be just as happy because this is sticky.'
There is method in the mononym.
This is a figure who is already hot marketing property, featuring in TV campaigns for Adidas, JD Sports and Google Pixel and becoming a face of Guess jeans. More will inevitably follow now he has joined a club that is widely considered to have cultivated the strongest brand in football.
Yet the name of Alexander-Arnold, double-barrelled and, as the player admitted, confusing internationally, has not always been an easy sell for marketing executives. It is long and clunky. Trent, by contrast, is clean and simple.
'If you think about brand architecture, then look at some of the some of the most successful companies in the world, whether that's Disney or Nike or Apple,' says Misha Sher, a global sports marketing expert and executive at WPP. 'It tends to be, for the most part, that they are relatively easy to remember. It's not a mouthful to say.
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'But it is quite a mouthful to say Alexander-Arnold, especially when you consider that football is a global game and not all of the world speaks English. Imagine trying to get someone in Spain, Brazil or China to to pronounce Alexander-Arnold. It won't be easy to remember it or to pronounce it.
'You want the visual identity and the brand architecture to be easy to build around, and 'Trent' is exactly that. I think he's right to have done that.'
There is agreement from the marketing world. 'It's an easier brand to land now, it'll be more recognisable and it'll be clearer,' says Laverty. 'There's a history, particularly more recently, where companies shorten their names. Hewlett-Packard becomes HP, Dunkin' Donuts becomes Dunkin', Kentucky Fried Chicken becomes KFC.
'There's a reason brands are doing it. The core bit of building a brand is it being memorable and entrenched in people's brains. In our world, you'd call it building memory structures around the brand.
'The core things around that are consistency. If a brand is called lots of different things, then it's difficult to build those memory structures. Consistency matters, which is why he talked about being called lots of different things. That's a problem for any brand. It's also about being simple and clean. That really matters.'
Alexander-Arnold is not the first player to wear his first name on the back of his shirt.
Plenty, including former Liverpool team-mate Virgil van Dijk and one-time England colleague Dele Alli, go with their forenames owing to strained family relationships, while others, like Jobe Bellingham and Jordi Cruyff, have done the same in an attempt to shed the weight of surnames already made illustrious by their relatives.
Spanish-speaking players, too, commonly go with first names. Like the Colombian James Rodriguez, also once of Real Madrid, and Sergio Busquets, now with Inter Miami.
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Alexander-Arnold, though, might be the first Englishman to do so partly motivated by brand recognition, and this may have been the perfect moment to do it.
'It's just about the timing,' says Sher. 'Part of this move is all about the next chapter for him. He came through Liverpool as a local boy, did really well, won major trophies and now he is moving on to the next chapter.
'Real Madrid gives him a global platform in a different way to build his brand and to shape it in a way he wants to. That is what he is doing.'
The defender's Instagram account, which has one million more followers since the move to Real Madrid was confirmed on May 30, now has the handle 'Trent' rather than 'Trent66', which included his old Liverpool shirt number.
'I think Trent is a player who looks at himself almost like a brand, and that's not just him, a lot of players do now,' said former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher on The Overlap podcast in March, referencing how Alexander-Arnold had suggested winning the Ballon d'Or would trump another Champions League with Liverpool.
Certainly, Real Madrid, the club of galacticos, do not mind elevating the individual. They have done in the past with players such as Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo, and continue to do so with the current crop, including Alexander-Arnold's close friend Jude Bellingham.
Will Real Madrid, then, have had their say on Alexander-Arnold's decision? 'It would not surprise me at all,' says Laverty. 'At the very least, I'd say they'd be really happy with what he's gone with. I'd say they'd be delighted.
'It helps them to lean into the player's brand. They'll have spoken about how they want to make him a megastar in the next few years and how they're going to get there together. I'd be surprised if the name change on the shirt hasn't at least been part of it.'
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Alexander-Arnold has already made friends around the Bernabeu after unexpectedly delivering an opening speech in Spanish, but it will be on the pitch that he needs to leave his mark, possibly at the Club World Cup this week, and it'll be with that first name across his shoulders.