An Open Letter to Hull City AFC

16th July, 2013

We ask that our owners respect the club's heritage and abandon any plans to rebrand it.

All Hull City fans have reason to be very thankful for Assem and Ehab Allam. Their timely intervention in late 2010 saved the club when it was clinging to the edge of a precipitous financial hole, and their subsequent investment has seen The Tigers rejoin the Premier League elite. Worthy of praise indeed.

However, our owners continually referring to the club as Hull Tigers is both disturbing and unwelcome, as is the piece by piece branding change to Hull City Tigers, which appears to be an intermediate step before we formally become Hull Tigers, bringing to an end 109 unbroken years of being Hull City AFC.

Assem Allam has publicly referred to the club as Hull Tigers on several occasions, something casually explained away as the owner merely using a 'pet name', but when Chairman Ehab called the club Hull Tigers in a statement made after the Radio Humberside interview with former chairman Paul Duffen, the usage went from being supposedly informal to quasi official as part of a club communiqué.

Forcibly implementing a name change without any fan consultation is wrong. It’s worse than that though, it seems as if the club have wilfully lied to us. We were told the modified crest (with AFC and THE removed and the remaining text centrally justified) that appeared on the club’s official site in April was just for publicity of an OSC event (this was stated in an Radio Humberside interview with Managing Director Nick Thompson conducted by that station’s James Hoggarth on April 17th) which we now know to be a falsehood, as the company name had been changed to Hull City Tigers in March.

Then we were further ‘assured’ by Nick Thompson (who spoke at a FLAG meeting held before the Cardiff game) that only the company name would be Hull City Tigers, but you don’t put the company name on the door of the team’s training ground, nor rewrite history on the club’s commercial site that in 2010 the Allams bought Hull City Tigers when in fact they bought Hull City AFC (link). That’s not referring to the company name, that’s renaming the team.

We’re not branding Nick Thompson the devil here, he is after all an employee of the Allams, and ultimately must do their bidding, even if over his objections. But his reassuring words have proved to be untruths, and that is an affront to every Hull City fan, even if they think a name change is a good idea.

It has been claimed, somewhat spuriously, that adding Tigers to the formal name of the club will somehow propel the club into a new realm of moneymaking possibilities in Asia but really what proof is there of that? Yes, the tiger is a powerful symbol in that region, but to say that the entire continent will suddenly adopt us as their club and be keen to buy merchandise because of a name change kind of suggests Asians are all gullible knaves who can be tricked out of their money at the first exposure to marketing. Consider that Manchester City have spent a small fortune trying to tap into the Asian market with somewhat limited success (and they've won the Premier League), the idea that City can crack Asia with a name change is frankly laughable.

The Asian markets stuff is just speculation anyway, there is nothing at all to suggest that is the real reason behind the change to Hull City Tigers and it seems this stealth rebrand is simply being done to satisfy the whims of our owner. A football club is a community pillar and civic entity, and should not be merely a rich man's plaything, no matter how much money he has put in. Ultimately the biggest benefactors of a club are the people who pay to watch them regularly and those people have had no say on any rebranding issue.

Some fans have said that there is little to worry about given that the 2013/14 shirts will have the same Hull City AFC crest as last year, but production lead times would have meant the new shirts were signed off late 2012 or the start of 2013 at the latest, to begin production soon after. By that point no mention of Hull City Tigers was evident anywhere, the company didn't change name until 05/03/13, by which time it would have been too late to amend the shirts. That's to say the use of Hull City AFC on the new shirts offers no guarantee that a club name change is not in the pipeline.

Further muddying of the waters where club identity is concerned occured when MKM renewed their naming rights sponsorship of the South Stand; The OWS quoted their Chief Executive David Kilburn as saying "Hull Tigers is such an important part of the fabric of the city and we value our relationship with the club highly" (link), which seems an odd thing for him to say when there is no team formally called Hull Tigers and the company has been involved in sponsoring part of HULL CITY's home for many years. If the club is not being rebranded then why would he have said Hull Tigers of his own volition? It just doesn't add up especially when the Ideal Boilers East Stand announcement had no such reference (link).

If the club is not being rebranded then referring to them as Hull Tigers or Hull City Tigers must stop, our club is Hull City AFC and should be described as such, not by the owner's 'pet name' or the name of the parent company as is currently the case on the club's official site and commercial site. Many Hull City fans place great value in the identity of our club, which may not have a glory littered and storied history, but is cherished nonetheless.

Marketing the club's nickname is a good idea but welding it to our club name is not.

Hull City AFC forever.

 

I suspect he's already seen it(I didn't write it, I'm merely publishing it on the boards).

 

I think it was written by Andy and Les at Amber Nectar, along with Andy from Tiger Chat.