Over the past 20 years or so businessmen with no football blood have decided to use many of the world’s football clubs as their new play-thing, a way to get rid of the money that burns a hole in their pockets.
Don’t get me wrong there are many businessmen who have bought football clubs which have been a success, guys like Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, who has sky rocketed them to European Champions and English Premier League Champions under his custodianship.
Even though the Russian has been criticised from all quarters due to his erratic approach to hiring and firing managers, one thing must go in his favour- unlike some of the owners these days he has not renamed Stamford Bridge, changed the shirt colour from the traditional royal blue or most importantly he has not changed the name of the football club. These may seem like minor things to a non-football fan, but for us fans it’s almost the equivalent of murder.
In all honesty I personally don’t have much of an issue with renaming football stadia per se. There are numerous top clubs who do it, Man City, Arsenal and most of the clubs in the Bundesliga. They see it as a cost effective way to generate ‘free cash’, improve the financial health of the clubs, and maybe even allow their manager some extra spending power in the transfer market.
This is more of touchy issue with European football fans rather than than those across the pond in North America. They don’t have football clubs, they merely treat their ‘soccer’ clubs as a franchise. You can see this with the likes of the San Jose Earthquakes who moved to Houston a few years ago, and were re-branded as the Houston Dynamo.
The only real comparison to this in England is MK Dons who moved the old Wimbledon FC from London to Milton Keynes. Since this happened many neutrals have disliked Peter Winkleman’s franchise club.
I’m going to conclude this article with two recent examples of bad club management which particularly angered me despite supporting neither club.
Firstly Cardiff City owner and businessman Vincent Tan. The Malaysian thought it would be a good idea for the club 141 years old to change its identity. The Bluebirds became the Red Dragons and also changed the colour of their blue home shirt to red! why? All because red is a lucky colour in Malaysia. That is totally ridiculous in my opinion.
The Malaysian has backed manager Malky Mackay well in the transfer market allowing them to play in the English top-flight this season, but what right does he have to change something so deep and synonymous with that club without consultation with the fans? At the time I listened to various radio phone-in shows and it was more the older generation of fans who seemed opposed to this, as most of the younger callers only cared about seeing their club participate in the EPL.
Then recently we have had Hull City owner Assem Allam go and change the clubs’ name to Hull City Tigers because in his words it was “too common and lousy”. Another ridiculous reason by an owner who has no regard for the club and its history and rightly the Hull fans have been up and arms by the disrespect shown by their owner.
It makes one wonder how long it will be before one of European football’s real big clubs change there name, club colours or god forbid their location, these owners should be more aware that in the UK football is more than a business or a game to us fans – it’s a way of life.
They need to really start consulting the real owners of the clubs – The Fans before making any more reckless, selfish disrespectful decisions.
