New owners causing friction

 Image © supportersnotcustomers.com

The influx of foreign ownership in soccer has been something that I’ve always been a bit cautious about. While I’d like to see a smaller club shake things up a bit, a lot of them just turn into billionaires’ playthings instead of serious ventures into soccer. With money being an issue in sport these sorts of owners are welcomed readily but more often than not they leave the club in a worse state than when they took over.

There’s two clubs that have come up to the Premier League this season that serve as prime examples of owners not taking fans into account when running their new teams. 

Malaysian investor, Vincent Tan, who took over at Cardiff two years ago decided on what seemed like a whim, that they would change the club’s colours from blue to red. Tan’s reasoning behind it was that the colour red appeals more to the Asian audience that he wanted to tap into. It is a valid way to expand into a new market. But why do that at the expense of the already loyal local fanbase?

They eventually went through with the rebrand. The club itself has never and probably won’t be big enough for a while for them to justify the change. The new fans that they did get through the rebrand may not stick around for long. So all it really did was alienate a large section of supporters.

There’s also Hull City owner, Assem Allam, who has also been talking about changing the club’s name to The Hull Tigers, claiming it’d be easier to market to a global audience. Again, as with Cardiff, it seems to be at the expense of existing fans.

Hull are one of the few clubs to have kept their name intact since their inception in 1904 and there’s a lot of tradition behind it. As with the Everton logo debacle I talked about in the last post, this is something fans take very seriously and it could have serious repercussions for Hull. Through personal experience there’s nothing that soccer fans seem to hate more than the Americanisation of the sport so adding the Tigers nickname to the end of the team name is going to really alienate a large portion of their local fans.

This kind of behaviour is what has concerned me the most about new owners coming into the game. At some level I understand that they want to shake things up but sport is one place where changes, especially drastic ones that concern the team’s identity, are not very welcome.

New options for Everton logo out

Image © Everton FC

Last year, Everton introduced a new logo that was widely criticised. Their fans signed petitions and many were threatening to boycott any merchandise with the new badge on it.

The club was quick to apologise and then went on to suggest a fan consultation for the next logo to be used in 2014. That period is under way now with designers working with a group of fans to come up with a better option. The logos suggested by the club aren’t quite what I would’ve expected though.

They are allowing fans to vote on which one they’d like to see but it clearly seems to me like the club have created two poor options so that the fans pick the one that they wanted to use all along.

Image © Everton FC

As I mentioned in my previous post, a club’s identity is so deeply tied with the fan culture that anything new, if incorporated poorly, can be problematic. And if even a minor change can cause fans to refuse to buy the team’s merchandise, what would a more drastic one do?

So I see nothing wrong with the current logo. The one that caused so much outrage was just a modernised version of their old badge. It's the direction in which I see soccer club logos moving now when it comes to their branding anyway. It has bolder lines and straight edges and definitely stands out a lot more than it used to but was just missing a few elements. As I've shown in the header, that logo would have been an easy enough fix right then and there.  Yet the club have pushed on with this new logo and it doesn’t look nearly as good.

A fresh start for the Toronto.. Huskies?

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There’s been a recent trend of bad teams in the NBA wanting to cleanse and start anew; the Charlotte Hornets and the New Orleans Pelicans have already rebranded for the upcoming season. A few months ago the Raptors considered a fresh start as well.

Maple Leaf Sports Entertainment hinted at bringing back the Toronto Huskies name that was the only other basketball team to play in the city until the Raps were formed.

It seems a bit silly that team was named after of a movie that was popular in the 90s. I mean, the franchise might as well have been called the Toronto Terminators or the Toronto Matrix. It never really had anything to say about the city like so many other teams’ names do.

While the Huskies name doesn’t quite represent the city, it does have a bit of history that should be taken into consideration. Being the only NBA team in the country, the name would be a little more relevant to the rest of the country but is still left wanting in Toronto.

Either way, the real question for me is whether or not the fans will really buy into it. Tradition is something that most sports fans really value and even though the Raptors are still a relatively young team, a sudden change might alienate sections of fans.