Tradition versus success; it is a trade-off at the heart of some of sport’s most agonising dilemmas, and it has been spotlighted again by the shenanigans at Premier League new boys Hull City.
As a Bristol City fan of some decades’ standing, I have a certain amount of sympathy with members of the City Till We Die campaign group who oppose owner Assem Allam’s idea to rebrand the club Hull Tigers.
Then again, when William Blake was inspired in 1794 to write one of the best-loved poems in the English language, he did not start it, “Robin, robin burning bright”.
If your club is blessed with the image of Mother Nature’s supreme feline predator as its longstanding nickname, then it surely makes sense to exploit it to the max. Particularly in light of the pronounced and irresistible financial shifts that the pay-TV age has brought to bear on the world’s favourite sport.
At root, this is another story about the astonishing global success of the Premier League and the compromises that traditional local supporters are required continually to make for their club to be part of it.
This success has now delivered a global media platform on which Premier League clubs can build a distinctive – and potentially highly lucrative – international brand identity of their own.
Clubs already imbued with a strong global identity, most notably Manchester United, are able not just to pocket their share of the international broadcasting rights proceeds like everyone else, but also to strike deals with a bewildering array of commercial partners.
In United’s case these have included a Russian airline, a Chinese commercial bank and even a Japanese paint company.
While it is easy to sneer loftily at such arrangements, they can provide clubs with a revenue edge in comparison to their rivals that can, with good management, be converted into a lasting on-field edge.
As professional services firm Deloitte observes in its latest Annual Review of Football Finance: “Outside of the ‘big six’ clubs, only the three promoted clubs and Wigan Athletic grew commercial revenue in 2011/12, highlighting the challenge for those Premier League clubs without significant global profile to upwardly negotiate deals or extend the range of commercial partners.”
How do clubs develop the sort of profile necessary to make themselves marketable in this way?
They need something that sets them apart: United have been able to draw on the brand-building equity of generations of players of global stature, stretching all the way back to the Busby Babes. This has been supplemented in recent times by the city’s international ‘cool’ quotient, which soared along with the reputations of rock bands such as The Smiths and The Stone Roses, and the deceased ‘stick man’ painter L.S.Lowry.
With local icons including William Wilberforce, Philip Larkin and the Humber Bridge, Hull punches above its weight in the cultural stakes. But the city does not, I think, possess a high international profile and, while they have been the cause of significant grief on the red side of Bristol, a football heritage based on the likes of Ken Wagstaff, Dean Windass and Tom Huddlestone, even the latest hirsute model, cannot compare with Charlton, Best, Cantona and Beckham.
In such circumstances, highlighting the club’s association with an animal whose beauty and potency is understood the world over, and more especially by sports fans from Hanshin to Cincinnati, seems frankly the obvious short-term marketing option to choose in an effort to drive revenues so as to help make the club’s latest Premier League sojourn as extended as possible. It seemed to work well enough for Esso and Kellogg’s.
Before pay-TV, of course, supporters had the influence simply to veto initiatives, commercial or otherwise, that they took against. (I wonder, for example, if supporter power explains why a flirtation by Hull with sky blue shirts in 1935/36 was abandoned.) And a canny owner will still want to keep the fans onside.
The simple fact is that the financial strength of the local supporter base of Premier League clubs has eroded hugely over the past two decades.
From this season, in which clubs are benefiting from a particularly rich new round of broadcasting deals, match day revenue is forecast by Deloitte to contribute less than 20% of total revenue – “compared with 48% in 1991/92, the season before the Premier League started”.
(In 2011/12, broadcasting provided half of the league’s overall revenue, with commercial revenue accounting for a further 27% and matchday revenue 23%.)
All the signs from the soap opera of recent Premier League seasons suggest that what fans want most from their clubs is on-field success. Such success is not guaranteed by commercial astuteness, but it is impossible on any sort of sustainable basis without it.
Supporters of Premier League minnows such as Hull may find that the sacrifice of some traditions, however cherished, is part of the price they must pay if they want their club to become an indispensable act in club football’s most compelling show.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.