Name change discussion

It's not true that Nick hasn't been offered another job in football, he just hasn't been offered one he fancied.

 

Oliver Kay - The Times...

Club traditions need preservation order

“I can assure all supporters that we will not be changing our name. Our name is our identity and remains at our core” — Vincent Tan

“I will never change the colour, never change the logo, never remove Hull, never remove Tigers. These words were there for many years” — Assem Allam

We can only begin to imagine the kind of philosophical ding-dong that lies in prospect in the boardroom at Cardiff City Stadium this afternoon. In the red corner, which really should be the blue corner, Vincent Tan, the Cardiff City owner, may try to explain why a club’s name is central to their identity. In the amber-and-black corner, Assem Allam, the Hull City owner, may respond by saying that a club’s colours, surely, are sacred.

In that respect, they would be right. It is just such a shame that they are both on the wrong side of the other argument. Tan ignored the protests of Cardiff supporters in changing the team’s colours from blue to red. Allam is doing likewise in trying to force through his attempt to change Hull City into Hull Tigers, having threatened to relinquish his ownership of the club if the proposal is rejected by the FA Council in April.

Many will shrug their shoulders and say that these traditions — a club’s name, the team’s colours — are not worth fighting for. Indeed, there are plenty who will join Tan and Allam in saying that it is so typical of football’s conservatism to stand in the way of progress. Progress, they will say, is forgetting about Cardiff’s traditional blue and embracing the colour red, which symbolises joy and good fortune in many Asian cultures. Progress, they say, is changing Hull’s name because, as Allam puts it: “City is not relevant; Tigers is the symbol of power.”

Allam has not taken kindly to criticism of his “Tigers” venture or indeed of the way he has gone about it. Hull’s fans, while expressing gratitude for the way he has revived the club’s fortunes since his takeover in 2010, have campaigned behind the slogan “City Till We Die”. “They can ‘City Till They Die’ as much as they like,” he said in November, having previously promised a period of consultation with the supporters. “No one on earth is allowed to question how I do my business. No one on earth. Let’s kill this point.”

Let’s kill this point? No, Dr Allam, let’s not. Let us ask seriously whether an owner — even a local businessman such as Allam — who moved to Humberside from Egypt in his late twenties and who has made substantial investments in the area as well in the club — has the right to make this kind of change while disregarding both heritage and feelings. Let us ask whether any of these owners — or, as they should be seen, custodians of institutions that change hands with alarming regularity these days — have the right to impose a name change.

Anyone with enough money, and, on occasions, some without, can buy a football club. The game’s authorities have seen to that, with their Owners and Directors Test, still nothing like a big enough improvement on the laughably named Fit and Proper Persons Test that allowed hugely important local institutions to fall into the chaotic, damaging ownership of hedge funds (Coventry City), poultry farmers (Blackburn Rovers), someone facing trial in connection with money-laundering allegations (Birmingham City) and so on.

Whether it is the FA, the Premier League, the Football League or even the Government, someone should be working on a type of preservation order to limit the damage that an owner can do. There have been some mostly welcome moves towards greater financial regulation — rather too late for Portsmouth and seemingly not enough to stop Blackburn and others drifting into dangerous waters — but the authorities have shown an appalling weakness in dealing with mayhem at Wimbledon (relocated to Milton Keynes and effectively taken over as a new franchise) and Coventry (relocated to Northampton, for the foreseeable future, because the aforementioned hedge fund is in dispute with Coventry City Council).

Changes to Cardiff’s kit and Hull’s name might seem trivial by comparison. “Not the end of civilisation as we know it,” as Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive, put it recently. But this stuff is extremely important to the people who matter, ie, the fans. More than that, it is part of a wider battle to protect the heritage of football clubs, which feels more worth fighting for than ever in this age of homogenised, indistinguishable town centres and dreary retail parks.

Allam’s argument is that the Tigers name would give Hull, as a club, an identity that they lack at present. You do not have to be an arch-cynic, though, to suggest that his distaste for “City” stems from his Coventry-esque dispute with Hull City Council over the freehold to the KC Stadium. In other words, this is another feud that is escalating out of control and, as so often, heritage is considered collateral.

Now, though, Allam has finally come up with something else to support his campaign. On Thursday, the Hull Daily Mail reported that the club had lined up at least two sponsorship deals that are contingent on City being dropped in favour of Tigers next season. Not really a great surprise, since that very contingency strengthens the case that the club will submit to the FA.

Yesterday, the club spelt out that the leading contenders for sponsorship deals next season “hail from regions where tigers are both prominent and celebrated”. The appeal to the Asian market is obvious, but if we are talking about a few million here or there, does that really justify a name change at a time when survival in the Premier League on its own is worth more than £50 million?

Hull’s statement yesterday made a point of mentioning an alternative proposal, whereby season-ticket prices are increased dramatically. They pinned it on, as they put it, “the 1,600 ‘City Till We Die’ campaigners”. It has taken more than six months, but the club have finally found a way to make that admirably dignified, sensible campaign look like it stands for a noisy minority who would happily force their fellow supporters to pay considerably more for their season tickets.

The latest revelations, combined with Allam’s threat to walk away if the name change is blocked, will have some supporters trembling. They may even have members of the FA Council — hardly a body known for its progressiveness or indeed its usefulness — thinking that they have to bow to Allam’s whims. You can almost hear them now: “Well, it is his club, I suppose. They do owe him . . . ”

Is Stockholm syndrome really the model that English football wants to pursue where relations between owners and supporters are concerned, though? At Blackburn, it has already reached the stage where Venky’s, having led the club into chaos, is now regarded as the lifeline that could keep the club out of administration. At Cardiff, similarly, there is now a financial dependency on Tan — as there is on Allam at Hull — that leads supporters to fear not only erratic management but also the dangers of protesting too vehemently against it.

Owning a majority stake in a club should not give anyone the right to trample over tradition. Even Venky’s, the Glazer family and, to some extent, Mike Ashley recognise that. Or at least they appear to recognise it.
If the FA is to shrug its shoulders and allow a name change at Hull, what is to stop Ashley turning his club into Newcastle Sports Direct or to stop Blackburn being rebranded as Venky’s FC? What, apart from their owner’s apparent respect for tradition, is to stop Manchester City being renamed Etihad or asking them to wear red, like the Abu Dhabi flag?

Football is going through a period of dramatic change, where clubs can be rendered almost unrecognisable — occasionally for better, mostly for worse — by changes in ownership. Since buying Hull in December 2010 for the nominal sum of £1, Allam has invested huge amounts in the form of loans, which have greatly improved the club’s finances and on-pitch fortunes, but it is a strange sense of entitlement to suggest that this gives him the right to change the name that Hull have had since 1904.

Perhaps Tan is the person to point this out to Allam. Perhaps Allam is the person to point out to Tan that a club’s colours, after more than a century, should not be changed. The hope is that the FA will show a bit of leadership on this one, not only blocking the name change but also taking the opportunity to set out a framework to preserve the heritage and health of clubs, whether in the Premier League or the Football League. That is what a proper governing body would do, isn’t it? We can all dream, can’t we?