Recently I wrote about Bolton Wanderers cancelling their sponsorship deal with pay-day short-term loan company QuickQuid on the back of pressure from supporters and questioned whether this could be a step in the right direction for the way football is run.
This month there has been another episode of fans voicing their opinions and leading a club to backtrack on a decision, this time at Cardiff. However, it can be argued that this does not fall into the same category as what happened at Bolton.
The issue at Cardiff was over the colour of their shorts on the new kit. It had been announced that they would be a darker shade of red, leading to a two-tone red kit for the club whose nickname has been the Bluebirds.
Unhappy with this decision, supporters aired their criticism and the owners at Cardiff backed down, saying they would put it to a vote and let the fans decide on the colour of the shorts. Black won out, meaning the colours will remain as they were when the Welsh team won promotion to the Premier League last campaign.
This was seen in some quarters as a victory for supporters, but one article in particular stood out about this incident. Former Cardiff striker Nathan Blake wrote a column that highlighted that the issue with this was that the vote was not about the colour of the shirt, something many Cardiff fans felt very strongly about when the change was announced, and still do.
By allowing fans to vote for the colour of the shorts and show they have a say, it was actually distracting from the problem of not being able to vote for the colour of the shirts. Regardless of the short colour they voted for, it was to go with the red kit.
Blake made it quite clear that Cardiff should be playing in blue shirts and that it was “a very big problem” that the colour of the shirts were red, but accepted this is unlikely to change soon. So the shorts were put up for vote.
On the other hand, this could be seen as a small step forward for fans getting clubs to listen to their opinions about the way a club is run. At least they listened and did not completely change everything about the club’s kit without consulting the supporters.
But, in this case, it would seem that Blake’s argument is more compelling. The vote for shorts would appear to be a way of detracting attention from the colour of the shirts, which is a contentious issue.
The difference, therefore, with Bolton is that when Bolton backed down from the QuickQuid sponsorship they replaced them with a partner of the local Bolton University and will have the University’s name on their shirts, which promotes the local community. Cardiff, however, will not be changing their main point of contention.
Perhaps things could change on this front. With more pressure, a return to blue could be a thing of the future.
Although not necessarily the same, these two cases do strongly emphasise that the challenges faced by supporters to be heard are various and cannot always be defined in easy categories but come with many complexities.
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