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The English Premier League, or EPL, the world’s most popular football league, has made a fairly deep penetration in Asia over the years. Top EPL clubs have looked to build their fan base in Asia by undertaking tours of the continent, mainly the Far East, before the start of a season.
Even in India, top clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool have sent their delegations and sought to involve school boys in training and have opened merchandise stores to tap the popular interest in EPL.
Yet from another standpoint, Asia’s association with EPL has been far from positive in recent times. Symbols of this were Blackburn Rover’s problems after it was taken over by Indian hatchery major Venky’s India during the 2010-11 season. Blackburn were EPL champions in 1994-95 and, although they suffered relegation in 1998-99, upon their return in 2000-01 they had been one of the most consistent mid-table sides.
Among the first decisions of Venky’s was to sack one of EPL’s more efficient managers, Sam Allardyce, while promoting first-team coach Steve Kean who had never previously managed a club. The decision perhaps had to do with the owners wanting to see a more attractive style of football which Allardyce was not known for, and yet, questions were asked whether Kean was the right man for the job.
Blackburn Rovers have been mired in chaos for most part of Venky’s reign: Four managerial sackings, including Kean’s, mid-tenure; a turbulent relationship between the owners and the fans; and the club’s relegation from top flight in 2011-12. The fact that there is a sense of disillusionment at the club can be gauged from the decline in the average attendance by 10,000 between the 2010-11 and 2012-13 season.
There has been some stability at Blackburn in the past ten months with Gary Bowyer as manager. When he took over as caretaker manager in March 2013 the club were relegation candidates. After close to a year, they are now in eighth place this season, just two points away from the cut-off point (sixth rank) for the playoff positions to determine the third team to be promoted to the EPL (the top two teams qualify directly). Stability is a key factor defining the equation of fans with clubs and owners. The extended stint of Bowyer and Blackburn’s good performance could just be the first step of the fan’s building bridges with the Indian owners.
The current symbol of EPL’s bitter-sweet relations with Asia is the crisis that has engulfed the newly-promoted Cardiff City, owned by Vincent Tan. The Malaysian businessman took control of the club in 2010 at a time when Cardiff City were facing closure. His arrival brought a greater degree of financial stability at the club, and more significantly, for the first time in 51 years, in the 2013-14 season the team was playing at the highest level of English football, the EPL.
But with the good often comes the bad, and over the past six months Cardiff City has lurched from one crisis to another. The problems began a year ago when Tan changed the club’s colours from the traditional blue to red, a move that angered the fans. But it is the events of this year that made people sit up.
Tan sacked the head of recruitment and replaced him with a 23-year-old, a friend’s son, with little knowledge or experience of football at this level. Then Tan changed the club’s crest by inserting a dragon, while suggesting that the club’s name be changed to Cardiff City Dragons. His harshest decision was sacking club manager Malky Mackay in December. Mackay had helped Cardiff to the Championship title in 2012-13, and at the time of his sacking Cardiff weren’t doing all that badly in EPL.
Not surprisingly, none of this endeared Tan with the fans. Far from it, they were angry with the Asian’s “whimsicality”. While there might have been an element of English snootiness at the barbs in the media and elsewhere against Tan, there was no denying that the Malaysian’s decisions didn’t seem to have been dictated by football logic.
Queen’s Park Rangers, whose 31% is owned by the Lakshmi Mittal family with his son-in-law Amit Bhatia as the family representative, have survived the kind of adverse negativity which Cardiff and Blackburn have received. In 2011, though, Bhatia had to resign from his position as vice-chairman following disagreements with the then board where Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone held a 67-per cent stake.
When Malaysian CEO of Air Asia, Tony Fernandes, became the majority shareholder after buying out Briatore and Ecclestone’s stake, Bhatia returned to being vice-chairman. The on-field performance of QPR has been erratic, the team narrowly escaping relegation in 2011-12, but unable to survive the drop the following season. They are playing well this season in the rung-below League Championship, sitting in third place and, thus, a prime contender to return to EPL next season.
If ‘Asian’ means from West Asia to the Far East, there have been exceptions — Abu Dhabi’s Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan took over Manchester City in 2008 and turned it into a football powerhouse.
Fact is that there’s much greater scrutiny on clubs controlled by the rank outsiders, Asians, who are in popular perception seen as being different from other non-English Europeans. Often enough, the perception has grown because of whimsical Asian owners like Tan who have shown little patience for or understanding of English sensibilities and come under the collective hostile and critical gaze of the English media.
Given their dubious reputation, it’s important that a club with Asian ownership ends up doing well, both in terms of on-field results as well as in its administration off the field. It has not been the case so far, and the sooner it happens, the quicker will the mental barrier against Asian owners be broken.
(The author is a sports management professional)
