What's In a Name?

Football fans tend to be conservative (with a small “c”), more likely to embrace evolution than revolution. Supporters of every team will expect and accept change; managers come and go, players come and go: nowadays owners come and go too. Increasingly clubs are likely to move home; that prime town centre site can easily be sold for housing or retail redevelopment and exchanged for an out of town stadium with all mod cons. Okay, the new ground (with all those mod cons, albeit lacking a certain character) may be less convenient to get to; maybe it is a bus ride away or necessitates a trip by car instead of the convenience of the more centrally located, if slightly shabby old ground, but fans will tolerate that. It is progress and the greater capacity and better facilities offset the inconvenience and the loss of that ramshackle, scruffy old ground, steeped though it was in tradition and history. But tradition is something that supporters hold dear and which club owners trample on at their peril, as the owners of two clubs have found out in recent months.

While fans will accept many changes, some may be beyond the pale. How would West Ham supporters react if the club decided that their move to the Olympic Stadium at Stratford should be accompanied by a change of name to say, Stratford Olympic, in the belief that such a change might attract new support? Or how would Liverpool react to a proposal to revert to the Blue and White shirts the team wore when the club was first founded? Unthinkable, surely.

The Olympic Stadium will be West Ham's new home; is a change of name beyond possibility?

Well, fans of Cardiff City and Hull City have either had changes like those foisted upon them or have been made aware of similar potential changes that strike at the very fabric of their clubs. Cardiff City fans may have been ambivalent about the change of ownership that saw Datuk Chan Tien Ghee take over as chairman in May 2010 with Tan Sri Vincent Tan Chee Yioun also investing and joining the board. They may have been happy that the new owners oversaw promotion to English football’s top flight but were less happy that the new owners changed the club’s colours from Blue, worn by City since 1908, to Red and changed the club badge to remove the traditional Bluebird, from which the club drew its nickname, replacing it with a Dragon. In May 2012, when news broke that the colour change was opposed by fans, the club announced that they “would not proceed with the proposed change of colour and logo and the team will continue to play in blue at home for the next season with the current badge.” Less than a month later the shirt colour and badge changes happened anyway. Tan was quoted on the subject of the changes as saying that “'A few (fans) were upset but like in any business if we get 80 per cent or 75 per cent of the customers happy, with 20-25 per cent not happy, that's fine. If they don't want to come to support our business, that's fine. We need the majority.”

Out with the old...

...in with the new.

It was significant that Tan referred to the fans as customers and that he was happy if the disgruntled among them did not want to support the club; he rather missed the point on what a football club should be. Yes, at the highest levels of the game they are businesses, big businesses that need to be run as such. But a football club is not a business in the same way that a supermarket is; if Sainsbury’s are no longer to your taste then you go to Tesco but you don’t lose any sleep over it, you don’t have a Sainsbury’s scarf and replica shirt that you can no longer bear to wear. If your football club does something that disenfranchises you then you tend not to go and support someone else. In this, and probably most other countries, football club owners are seen as custodians of a club’s tradition and heritage and because they are transient they are merely caretakers; they tamper with those traditions and heritage at their peril.

This man thinks that fans are "customers".

Meanwhile on Humberside, Hull City owner Assem Allam proposed changing the club’s name to Hull Tigers, prompting supporters to form a campaign group called City Till We Die. Allam retorted by saying that fans can “die as soon as they want.” He called the City name “lousy” and “common” stating that the Tiger brand would be more marketable. Fans behind the City Till We Die campaign ere hooligans said Allam; a “militant minority” who disturbed and distracted the players: inflammatory remarks that will have done little to appease supporters mistrustful of the chairman and his motives.

This man thinks that City is "lousy" and "common."

There is no doubt that to prosper in the Premier League, or even simply to survive, clubs need to compete both on and off the field. Gone are the days when football clubs, chaired perhaps by a wealthy local businessman who also happened to be a fan, could bumble along largely thanks to the largesse of their bank manager. To compete at the very top of the tree nowadays clubs need to match the investment capabilities of men like Roman Abramovitch at Chelsea or Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan at Manchester City; simply to survive in the Premier League now requires serious amounts of money, sums of money which clubs can often only attract by providing their new benefactors with pretty much a blank sheet of paper on which to draw their designs of the club, moulded in its owner’s image.

Should either Cardiff or Hull change their names then both clubs should expect plenty of sympathy but also ridicule from fans of other clubs; British football supporters tend to be contemptuous of this kind of thing as we saw from the vitriol that was poured over Franchise FC (otherwise known as MK Dons). If the name changes were accepted, would this pave the way for further rebranding of football clubs and if so, what sort of names could we look forward to? Probably some could be the mere addition of the club nickname, such as Manchester Red Devils but there’s the potential for such American football style monikers [1]like Reading Roughnecks, Sunderland Storm or Blackpool Rock. I can just hear Charlotte Green reading the classified football results now, “Fleetwood Fisherman 1, Northampton Cobblers 1,” that sort of thing.

Ultimately is it important what colours the team play in, or what the club is called? These surely are inconsequentialities compared with whether the club plays in the Premier League rather than League Two, or whether the club exists at all. But are they? Well actually yes; to repeat my earlier point, owners are mere custodians of a club’s tradition and heritage and because owners are transient they are merely caretakers. Most football clubs in the English leagues have histories dating back more than one hundred years, histories that their supporters take seriously, histories that mean a great deal to a great many people, histories that the temporary owners would do well to consider before they instigate changes that (in the case of Cardiff and Hull) may appear largely cosmetic, but which create marginal benefit while engendering significant hostility.

A football club is not a democracy; the owners are entitled to act as they see fit, but while they may be successful businessmen that does not automatically infer that their every decision will be popular, let alone correct and that in terms of maintaining the history and traditions of a football club, the natural guardians are more likely to be the fans than an owner whose awareness of the club’s very existence may not extend beyond a few months.

The chairmen of Cardiff City and Hull City should remember that football fans who have supported their teams through thick and thin will tolerate a great deal from the players and from management and will remember them affectionately for their successes (and sympathetically for their failures) for years to come, but chairmen who preside over success will likely be remembered not at all; chairmen who preside over financial ruin or bring their club into ridicule are likely to remembered with only the opprobrium their actions deserve.

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[1] No disrespect to American football teams or their names; it’s a matter of horses for courses and that word tradition again.