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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.
