While it’s a common occurrence to see an Australian or American sporting organisations and clubs referred to by their nickname, English football clubs, even though they all have one or more, don’t utilise nicknames as much.
A team may have a well-known moniker, like ‘The Red Devils’, but for the fans who attend games regularly, they’re more likely to refer to their team by their full name, or an abbreviation of it – Manchester United, United, – than use any other term.
As always, there are exceptions to this: a mention of the name ‘Wolves’ will get most fans of the roundball game thinking of a Black Country club, fallen on hard times, and who ply their trade in gold shirts.
But then, I’ve heard the town’s name Wolverhampton get shortened to ‘Wolves’ by the locals, so this could be seen as just an abbreviation of the club’s name rather than a use of their official nickname.
Similarly, should a club’s name incorporate a title, especially one not used by many other clubs, then that (or a variation of it) is likely to get more of an airing than a nickname too: Spurs, Forest, Albion etc.
There are also clubs where the fans use unofficial names, rather than the official one: my own club Sunderland are rarely referred to as ‘The Black Cats’ by fans, but more often as just’The Lads’. Anyone, over the age of 10, attending a match at the Stadium of Light and chanting “Ha’way the Black Cats” is likely to attract some bewildered looks.
Likewise Sunderland’s near-neighbours and fierce rivals, Newcastle United, are officially ‘The Magpies’, but their fans usually prefer ‘The Toon’ (the local pronunciation of’The Town’).
Clubs that get more use of their nicknames tend to be the ones that have some degree of history applied to them, Arsenal’s ‘The Gunners’ being a prime example, Stoke City’s ‘The Potters’ another.
The use of club nicknames in England seems to be, in the main, isolated to younger fans, for whom club mascots (often a middle-aged bloke dressed in a cartoon-esque costume symbolising the name) are usually designed to appeal to; or to the media, those who would rather enliven an article or match review by mentioning a club by a variety of names, instead of the same suburb or town name throughout.
I’ve always put the poor take-up of nicknames down to tradition, something your average English fan likes to cling on to, even in this day and age of corporate boxes, pay-TV subscriptions, Champions League fixtures, vastly inflated transfer fees and so on.
For a lot of fans, especially of those that don’t compete for Champions League spots, and whose players are not internationally known superstars, tradition and heritage are often all they have.
However, we’ve recently seen one club’s owner decide to discard the club’s traditional name and re-brand them with their long-standing nickname instead.
Assem Allam, owner of recently-promoted Hull City, on the eve of a new season in the English Premier League, has announced the club are to now be known as ‘Hull City Tigers’.
There have been a number of recent ‘re-branding’ exercises that seem to serve little but to rile their respective club’s fans: Wimbledon’s owners relocated the club to a new home in Milton Keynes and rebranded them as the MK Dons; and last year Cardiff City’s owners swapped their club’s traditional blue kits for red, reasoning the colour is more popular in Asian markets and would attract new fans (in keeping with the theme of this piece, it’s worth noting the club’s nickname was/is ‘The Bluebirds’).
None have proven popular with their clubs’ fans.
Hull have had the nickname ‘The Tigers’ for years, thanks to the club’s iconic amber and black striped shirts. For a spell in the early Nineties they even wore a hideous ‘tiger-skin’ shirt, possibly one of English football’s worst ever kits.
But the name has always been just a nickname, the club’s official name having been Hull City AFC for over 100 years.
Mr Allam’s reasoning behind this change is he feels by having a shorter, snappier, easy-to-recognise name the club will have a higher profile, and attract new supporters, both locally and overseas.
Hull City Association Football Club? Meh…
Hull City Tigers? Pow!
Mr Allam has also stated that, internationally, he’d like the club to be known as Hull Tigers, dispensing with the term ‘City’ altogether.
His reason? And this is a good one:
“Hull City is irrelevant, my dislike for the word ‘City’ is because it is common. City is also associated with Leicester, Bristol, Manchester and many other clubs.”
Tigers though? No one’s ever going to associate that name with somewhere like Leicester are they? Oh, wait.
Some, including a few fans of the club, have been rather pragmatic about this change, arguing Mr Allam owns the club, has saved it from ruin, and ploughed a lot of his own money into the team to get them back into the Premier League.
Therefore with that success, like Cardiff’s too, has to come some sacrifice.
I see this as being a terrible move. But I’m hopeful that just as club owners come and go with some regularity, Mr Allam will one day leave the club and a new owner, wanting to win over the fans (maybe after selling off some of the club’s players and stripping their assets, the cynic that I am!) will rename the club back to Hull City AFC.
In the meantime, should Hull City surpass all expectations and succeed this season (as unlikely as it is: the club are most pundits’ favourite for the drop) they could potentially gain some additional support in overseas regions that previously had no links to the East Yorkshire club.
While that in itself is something that, ordinarily, most might celebrate, my concern is the re-branding may be given as a reason for this by the club’s owners.
If that does happen, and it is viewed elsewhere as a success, then how long before we see other clubs follow suit?
The day my club announces the team are to now be called the ‘Sunderland Black Cats’ – or worse, just the ‘Black Cats’ – is one I hope to never see.
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