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.

I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues

In a way that only sport can, yesterday the city of Cardiff saw rugby finally see common sense while their footballing counterparts self-destructed into a ludicrous red, Malaysian mess. On the same afternoon that the Cardiff Blues announced that they’d be leaving the Cardiff City Stadium and returning to their city-centre home of the Arms Park, Cardiff City’s investors also announced that a re-brand of the club was imminent; which would see the club ditch their traditional blue shirts for red ones.

The supporters of the Cardiff Blues have been calling for the switch ever since the move back in 2009. Many fans have never even seen a game in the new stadium, and they’re not missing much. The droning, non-atmospheric, blue shell has got progressively worse game after game; to the extent that even the hardiest of supporters have given up. This was epitomised by the final game (hopefully) to ever be played at the ground, where just over 3,500 turned up to bid farewell to their departing stars such as Martyn Williams, Richie Rees, Gethin Jenkins and Xavier Rush among others. It summed up the Blues’ season, an enormous sense of ‘who cares?’.

The circumstances surrounding the Blues’ eventual departure the old Leckwith ground are slightly dubious to say the least. Richard Holland took over as Chief Executive and the fans hoped that the new man would see sense, but in January, when he was questioned regarding a possible move back the Arms Park he said,

“My brief is to make it work at the Cardiff City Stadium, full stop.”

“Whilst people aren’t coming, it’s people that make the atmosphere. So perhaps they need to take a look at themselves and come down and create the atmosphere.”

However yesterday, a matter of four months later he expressed,

“This move is important for our future sustainability,”

“Having listened to the supporters, sponsors and reviewed the financial position of the business, the board and I believe the Cardiff Blues should be playing back at the Arms Park.”

Quite a drastic change of opinion and commitment for a man of such stature, don’t you think? More likely than ‘listening to the supporters’, it’s very probable that Cardiff City’s owners were losing so much money that they asked them to terminate their contract. Because so few people were making their way through the turnstiles, they must’ve been making a net loss. In the first year, when the Blues were averaging 10,000-11,000 attendances for every home game, all was well. But now, with as little as 2,000 coming in, it can’t possibly cover the costs of maintaining the stadium with such things as catering, hospitality, pitch maintenance, licensing, safety stewards, policing etc. With that in mind, if Cardiff City were making a loss, it’s anyone’s guess how much money Cardiff Blues were losing. In business terms therefore, it’s a no-brainer. Although both clubs will portray it as a mutual separation, the likelihood is that the Cardiff Blues were shown the door by their landlords because they weren’t holding up their end of the bargain. It makes the Blues look like they're moving for the fans and it makes the Bluebirds’ owners look like compassionate businessmen for possible future partners; everyone’s a winner.

Let’s break it down further, everyone involved at Cardiff City are happy. The fans don’t have to share a stadium with rugby fans who share an already hostile relationship, the players don’t have to play on a pitch trampled by front rowers, the owners are free to expand and make changes for their own benefit and the club have their name and only their name on the lease. The same can be said of the Blues. As a club, they’ll have their own ground and a reinvented sense of identity, the players will get to play in a stadium with atmosphere, the fans will finally get what they wanted years ago and the owners aren’t restricted as to what they can or can’t do with their ground. Everyone’s happy? Not quite.

The problem is, because of the shoddy way the Cardiff Blues has been run in the past few years, it’s now probably got its weakest playing staff in the region’s history. With the loss of so many players and no-one coming in to replace them, they are threadbare in so many positions.

This is probably the best match day squad the Cardiff Blues could put out onto the field next year:

15. Leigh Halfpenny
14. Alex Cuthbert
13. Dafydd Hewitt
12. Jamie Roberts
11. Tom James
10. Jason Tovey
9. Lloyd Williams
8. Andries Pretorius
7. Sam Warburton
6. Josh Navidi
5. Bradley Davies
4. Lou Reed
3. Scott Andrews
2. Rhys Thomas
1. Sam Hobbs

16. Ryan Tyrrell
17. Tau Filise
18. Ryan Harford
19. James Down
20. Michael Paterson
21. Rhys Downes
22. Ceri Sweeney
23. Chris Czekaj

Who’s left? A few young, overweight props, Dan Fish, Gavin Evans and Richard Mustoe. It’s doubtful that the European elite are quaking in their boots looking at this line-up. The three best players in that squad are Sam Warburton, Leigh Halfpenny and Jamie Roberts who between them managed 23 appearances between them all season (Warburton 8, Halfpenny 10 & Roberts 5). This means that they’ll be reliant on their squad players who frankly aren’t good enough.

Before they moved to the outskirts in 2009, they reached the semi-final of the Heineken Cup, attracting 42,000 to the Millennium Stadium to see them miss out on the final by an inhumane penalty shootout. This in undoubtedly the region’s biggest success and that’s including the EDF and Amlin Challenge Cup trophies that are being packed away ready for a move into the city centre. Since then, the board has been under the illusion that the region has been developing because of the move to the stadium and their flash new training facility. Not only has the region not been developing, it’s moved backwards.

Many Cardiff fans will remember the evening that over 20,000 crammed into the Arms Park to see the Blues’ star signing Jonah Lomu. Who have the same fans been treated to since rugby’s biggest global name donned the baby blue shirt? The worst overseas signing in the history of sport in Sam Norton-Knight and the most negative rugby player on the planet in Dan Parks. They made one fantastic signing in Gavin Henson because he’s a player that people will pay to come and watch and rightly or wrongly, he was hung out to dry for having a beer with other members of the team and management. They were given the opportunity of some sort of input by Graham Henry who has indicated his desire to be affiliated with the Blues in an advisory role, a decision they turned down and opted instead for a horrifying double-act of mediocrity in Justin Burnell and Gareth Baber.

The region cannot afford to spend the summer patting themselves on the back for getting it right for the fans, they must be proactive. Phil Davies has the hardest job of all in getting the best out of an average set of players with little or no money to bring his own men in. If the club really want to make this move for the fans, surely a few games should be played up at Sardis Road to at least try and change the minds of their valleys population. This shouldn’t be a token gesture of a Connacht or Aironi fixture but a slightly more illustrious game.

The honeymoon period won’t last long for the Blues unless they can make the Arms Park the fortress it once was. Many of us will travel the short distance from a Cardiff bar to the Arms Park in the first few weeks of the season, but they must sustain some form in order to pull the people back in. Given the weakness of their squad this is a monumental task, though at least we’ll all be in the right place to watch it all unfold; stood on terrace with an SA Brains in hand.