4 Football Club Owners Rewriting History

4. Vincent Tan And Dato Chan Tien Ghee (Cardiff City)

While the not-particularly well-liked chief executive of Cardiff City is currently making negative headlines for his questionable treatment and eventual sacking of manager Malky McKay, many fans had already turned against Vincent Tan. In May 2010, Tan and Chan joined forces to take control of the financially stricken Cardiff, and their first move was to assure popular manager Dave Jones of his secure position at the club. This went down well with fans, and by the time Jones was given the boot a year later many fans had already grown tired of his failure to get the club into the Premier League. Soon after replacement McKay had led Cardiff to a third straight failure in the play-offs, the unthinkable happened. A statement on the club's official website confirmed plans to change the club's strip colours and crest. Instead of a bluebird, the primary symbol would be of the Welsh red dragon, with the bluebird relegated to a token gesture beneath that dragon. In a more obvious change to casual viewers, the home strip was also changed from blue to red, with blue becoming the new away strip's colour. However, for diehard fans this move was a stab in the back, as the club's nickname, 'The Bluebirds' was deep-rooted in Cardiff tradition. The club's original colours were actually chocolate and amber before the change to royal blue, around 1910, but not long after this change, a classic children's play called 'The Blue Bird' came to the city's New Theatre. It had a six-night run and received favourable reviews. The play's writer Maurice Maeterlinck recieved a Nobel Prize for Literature partially based on this play, and the furore surrounding this led an unknown Cardiff fan to start calling the team 'The Bluebirds.' The club eventually officially officially adopted the nickname. One would somehow doubt that anyone would be stupid enough to adopt 'The Dragons' as a nickname, at least not in public.