Redbirds Don't Fly

Football may not lead the way in prostituting itself for money, but this week, Cardiff City Football Club’s owners have managed to top the whore class. Malaysian owners, headed by the main investor Vincent Tan, have decided that red is a more dynamic colour for marketing in Asia, is more significant to Wales and will help bring in more sponsors and funding from overseas. Therefore they intend to change the bluebirds’ shirt colour from blue to red with talks of a re-name and a(nother) brand new club crest


The way that money rules most sports now is beyond recovery. The sheer size of the contracts on offer from television companies for the rights to broadcast games is unimaginable and the new way that football clubs are run seems to always involve a foreign investor. In the premier league, the first high-profile case was that of Roman Obramovich nearly a decade ago when he entered the fray at Chelsea Football Club. He was met with detestation by other clubs when he appeared to be throwing money into the club and paying preposterous amounts of money for players such as £30m for Andriy Shevchenko, then a British record signing. His spending has gradually reduced since his early days, yet last season he funded the ludicrous £50m signing of Fernando Torres. This has led to people coming in and buying clubs that are struggling financially out of their debt and having sole ownership of the club. Not only is this unsustainable for business, it’s a completely unethical way of running a football club. The two Spanish giants, Barcelona and Real Madrid reported last year that their debts as football clubs are €483m and €244m respectively. This gets overlooked by the bigger teams because it’s viewed as a manageable debt because of the value of the club, players and stadiums etc. Though for other teams to be able to compete, the first thing they have to be able to match is money. This is where foreign investors come into play with truckloads of cash to spend on players, training facilities and new stadiums.

One could argue that it’s acceptable for this to happen at the top level of the game. Manchester City have all but proven that you indeed can buy Premiership titles and even if they do slip up at QPR this weekend, they’ve still had a pretty decent season. It’s accepted now that teams will be bought and transformed overnight to achieve any goal that their egotistical owners should want to achieve. But we need only look at Blackburn Rovers for an example of a team that have been the creators of their own downfall. In November 2010, the Indian company V H Group bought the club with a mission statement of winning the premier league once more. They sacked the then manager Sam Allardyce and brought in his replacement in Steve Kean. In the previous season, Allardyce guided a limited squad to a very respectable 10th place finish and reached the semi-final of the league cup. Blackburn Rovers have now been relegated from the Premier League and Sam Allardyce’s West Ham United are poised to replace them if they can beat Blackpool in the play-off final.

It’s a tragic situation when this attitude filters into the lower leagues, and this is exactly the situation that Cardiff City find themselves in. They’ve had a turbulent time financially since Andy Campbell propelled them into the Championship back in 2003. It’s not the first time that Cardiff City fans have had to endure the talks of a club re-brand. When Hammam bought Cardiff City for a fee thought to be in the region of £11m after leaving the crazy gang at Wimbledon, his vision was to get the whole Welsh population to support Cardiff by renaming the club The Cardiff Celts and changing the colour of the kit to red, white and green. The flamboyant owner also tried to legally change the Welsh flag to the St David’s Cross, claiming the Welsh dragon bore no significance to the country at all. It eventually ended in Cardiff City adopting the cross as its own and changing their club crest. He then took out a loan under the club’s name in 2004, only for him to walk away from the club without spending a penny and claiming it as his own as he sold it as part of the club’s assets. He left the club leaving a foul stench of betrayal when he sold it to Peter Ridsdale for £23.7m with all the money that was promised to be spent on players ending up in his pocket. This left a crippling £40m debt in the incapable hands of Ridsdale which has lead to the eventual takeover from the Malaysian money-men.

A £40m debt would be nothing to a big club, but that’s just the issue, Cardiff City are not a big club. At championship level, yes, they are up there with the best; but it’s the second tier of British football. Despite attracting names like Robbie Fowler, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Craig Bellamy, they are not a massive team. This is what makes the state of affairs all the more disastrous, because the Cardiff fans follow their team because they are Cardiff people. Ask most Cardiff fans, and they’ll tell you they’d rather play in Blue in League 2 than in red in the Premier League. They don’t want to be Manchester United, Barcelona or Real Madrid with fans from all over the world. They couldn’t care less if their fan base in Asia is growing and shirt sales around the world are at an all-time high.

There’s something really sad about listening to a radio phone in and hearing the presenter announce “Brian is a Manchester United fan, hello Brian,” only for Brian to have the harshest cockney accent you’ve ever heard. If people are aroused by being a big-club follower when they live no-where near the where the team play and no affiliation to the club whatsoever, they haven’t lived. How fun can it actually be being a Barcelona fan? If they don’t win every competition they enter, it’s a failure and if they don’t beat the majority of the sides in La Liga by four goals it’s been a poor night. They might have a local football team within 10 miles of their house, but because they don’t win things, they can’t get the following of the fickle football world.

There’s nothing quite like walking from a dingy Grange End Stand with a pie in hand dissecting a 3-0 home drubbing at the hands of Plymouth Argyle, picking out the positives of a Richard Langley, Andy Lee, Darren Purse or a Leo Fortune West et al’s performance on the train home. It’s an art that the smaller clubs have mastered and it brings with it a sense of togetherness that bonds the people of the city. For 90 minutes, the world stops. The smallest club can reduce the biggest man in the ground to tears and there’s something eerily beautiful about that. For that 90 minutes; children, teachers, bankers, factory workers, toilet cleaners, bus drivers and every other title in the ground are in unity for one reason, the football team that’s on the pitch. People may be holding onto their 42nd consecutive season ticket or coming through the turnstiles for the first time, it doesn’t matter, they’re there and their goal is a collective one; to see their team win. These people may never actually meet, but they’ll be bound for life by that football club, shirt and crest. Be it Doncaster, Scunthorpe, Aldershot, Wolves, Stoke or Motherwell; it’s the same up and down the country.

You can find yourself in a city anywhere in Britain and the aesthetics of each high street in Britain is quintessentially the same. You have the same shops, you’ll stop for a Starbucks and have a look out the window at HMV with a Topshop bag at your feet thinking about when’s best to avoid the queue at Nandos. The placelessness of Britain’s cities makes identity all the more difficult, but two things you can rely on are accents and football supporters. When you hear your accent anywhere else in the world, it’s an unwritten law that you can go over to them and talk about your football team. Football teams give people an identity and a sense of belonging which the owners of Cardiff City are in danger of putting through the shredder.

For these reasons and so many more, football should be better than this. What gives a group of Malaysians the right to come into a football club and decide to change a club’s name, the colour of their shirt, their club badge and throwing away the tradition and history that many fans hold dear to their hearts. Unfortunately, the answer is money. One of Cardiff City’s directors was quotes as saying,

“You can’t take our history away but our history won’t raise dollars in the Far East.”

It’s difficult to even comprehend that the directors of the club seem to think that the solution to their crippling debt is selling shirts in Asia. Even the worst economists in the world (like the ones that run the country) will tell you that this isn’t the answer.

If this change is permitted, not only will there be two teams called The Dragons playing in Wales, but more importantly it will give these people unlimited power as to what they can change. Should someone want to purchase the Cardiff City Stadium in the future and there was a 50,000-seater stadium available in Newport or Bridgend, would they up sticks and move out of Cardiff? If a lucrative multi-million pound offer came in, would the board decide to rename the club in a sponsorship deal? The club we once knew as Cardiff City Football Club could become the Tesco Dragons, their home matches would be played on the outskirts of Bridgend at the Cilit Bang Arena and they’d play in lime green and magenta with a tribal design because it’ll increase shirt prices in Outer Mongolia. As we do so many times, we must wait on the powers that be in hope that their brains haven’t been strangled by corporate greed and come to their senses. The wait begins.