- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
One major advantage Sydney FC enjoys over local rivals Western Sydney Wanderers is a vastly superior name. In a league of questionable monikers, the sky blue side of the city wins hands down.
There is so simply no mistaking what the name Sydney FC stands for. It’s a football club which represents Sydney.
Sydneysiders who have over the years complained that the club somehow fails to represent their specific part of the city seem to have overlooked a fairly obvious point.
It’s a big city, hence a name which encompasses all of it.
No disrespect to Western Sydney who, let’s face it, have already surpassed their crosstown rivals in pretty much every other respect, but the Wanderers nickname sounds a bit naff.
Yes, it supposedly has links to the Wanderers club which played the King’s School way back in 1880 and we can all get excited about a blockbuster visit from Bolton one day, but basically the whole idea of officially ascribed nicknames just seems a bit silly.
It’s come up as a bit of an issue in the English Premier League of late, where the owners of both Cardiff City and Hull City have made overtures about changing their respective clubs’ names.
There are a few points to consider when it comes to Cardiff City.
For one thing, they’re not even English. More importantly, it took the club from the Welsh capital over half a century to return to the top tier of English football.
It’s that second fact which casts the changing of their club colours and badge last season in an interesting light.
“Cardiff changed their home colours to red and black as well as their badge from the 2012–13 season, in exchange for an investment plan from the Malaysian owners (led by Vincent Tan) including a new training facility, stadium expansion and a transfer budget,” surmised the redoubtable Wikipedia.
And Mr Tan, an ethnic Chinese billionaire with long-held ties to the gambling industry, is reputedly mulling over a decision to rename the club Cardiff Dragons.
Meanwhile, Hull City owner Assem Allam has already gone one step further and unilaterally decided to rebrand his club the Hull Tigers.
And why not? He owns the club. Surely had can do what he likes?
The big difference between Messrs Tan and Allam is that the latter is a prominent local businessman with strong links to the community.
He may have labelled the City moniker “too common,” but unlike the sort of foreign consortiums who announce grand intentions to take the likes of Kidderminster to UEFA Champions League glory within five years, Mr Allam has at least been motivated, in part, to plough his money into Hull City for altruistic reasons.
Does that make a difference?
At the crux of the matter is a clash of cultures – a good old-fashioned tug-of-war between a couple of hundred year-old football clubs and modernity in all its globalised glory.
Long gone are the days when football clubs simply represented their local community; these days teams like Cardiff and Hull can potentially be watched by billions of fans across the planet.
Should it come as a surprise, then, that a Malaysian owner might change his club’s colours to something more auspicious, or that a local investor is keen to differentiate his club from Manchester City or Leicester City or the potentially renamed Cardiff City?
Should it even matter?
In the end, football – like so many 21st Century industries – finds itself trying to balance long-held traditions with the economic realities of the day.
Plenty of Cardiff City fans protested when the club changed its colours, but even more celebrated in silence when they won promotion back to the top flight.
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote a bloke called William Shakespeare in a mildly popular play he once jotted down.
But does the essence of a football club change according to its name?