Cardiff City’s Malaysian owners have bowed to a storm of protest from fans and Welsh Assembly members over plans to make the team play in red next season. This is one of the worst cases I have seen of claimed commercial logic threatening the heritage of a club. Unfortunately, rejection of the plans to play in red may threaten the club’s financial future.
Cardiff City’s Malaysian owners have bowed to a storm of protest from fans and Welsh Assembly members over plans to make the team play in red next season. This is one of the worst cases I have seen of claimed commercial logic threatening the heritage of a club. Unfortunately, rejection of the plans to play in red may threaten the club’s financial future.
Malaysian owner Vincent Tan was prepared to put £100m into the club if the move to red shirts came about. The reasoning was that red is a strong colour in the Far East and the Malaysians believed that they could bring in huge revenue through the sale of replica shirts in Asia. It was also proposed to change the club badge from a bluebird to a Welsh dragon.
Whether any of this made commercial sense is open to question. There are other ways of showing that ‘The East is Red’, although I suppose the dragon might have been confused with a Chinese one. However, with all respect to Cardiff City, their profile in Asia is currently not that high and it would take a big investment of time and effort to raise it.
I doubt whether it would have been ‘a springboard for the successful commercialisation of promotion of the club and its brand’ because the brand would have lost its inherited definition. The intention was to ‘demonstrate the symbolic fusion of Welsh and Asian cultures’, but that seems quite a big step to me. I think that the Welsh speaking members of my family would be baffled by it.
However, the Malaysians now seem to have got the hump. In particular they are upset that someone leaked the plans before they were finalised, but it is difficult to keep something as controversial as this under wraps. They have also denied that they intended to turn the stadium red or change the name of the club.
Cardiff chairman Dato Chan Tien Ghee has now said in an open letter to fans that the club cannot be permitted to carry on ‘losing large amounts of money every month’ as happens at the moment and growing in debt’. Future strategy will be be reassessed which may include looking for new and additional partners and investors.
That all sounds a bit ominous as does the comment that ‘the club inevitably now faces bold and real world decisions should we want to see the club survive. As romantic and simplistic a notion as it may seem, maintaining our current course without growth or change, is not, and cannot be, an option.’
Cardiff fans may simply want their club back, although it can’t be denied that the club has faced a succession of financial challenges in recent years. But when globalisation is done well it is sensitive to local cultures.