Melbourne Heart fans welcome City cash, but ready to fight for their identity
The fans' role in Manchester City's A-League vision is unclear, but Heart loyalists are determined to make their voices heard
You didn't need to see his sharp new haircut to know Harry Kewell had turned up to play. It was Melbourne Heart's first home game since becoming property of Manchester City, and while Kewell very much deserved his standing ovation – he had just captained his 10-man outfit from a goal down against Sydney FC to one of the sweetest victories in the club's short history – every player had made this happen.
There was a focus, determination and composure about the Heart barely seen last year. There was confidence and self-belief. They were even playing it out from the back without their usual awkwardness. They wanted this one badly.
There was a verve about the crowd, too. It was typically small, but the chants were loud, and they went at it non-stop. They too were excited at suddenly having a benefactor of City’s size behind the club. Dreams of becoming the big team in town suddenly seemed wildly unambitious, when becoming a force in Asia and the feeder team for one of the biggest in the world might be on the cards.
You could also read the unusually vocal support as a sign the Heart fans want to make sure their voice is heard. As much as they want success, they don’t want to do it all on City’s terms. They especially don’t want to do it in sky blue, and just to make sure that message wasn't lost, they unfurled an "Our club, our colours" banner before the match.
"It’s important to hold on to a few things that are part of the identity of the club as you progress forward,” says Cameron Osterlund, president of the Red and White Unite supporters’ group, “and the colours are a big part of Melbourne Heart's identity.
“A new name is one thing ... but I know the colours are something 95%, or probably 99%, of the supporters would not to see changed.”
A Manchester City supporters’ group in Melbourne has said it could not stomach a team in red. But for Osterland, this should be no Brady Bunch-style merger. There is only so much of the club's identity Heart fans are prepared to sacrifice for success.
However, the new owners can really do whatever the FFA will permit them to. Unlike AFL clubs, whose members vote in their boards, A-League fans are at the whim of whichever board their club’s owners put together (as evidenced by some of the tension between Victory and its supporters this season). There has been no contact between Heart’s supporters and City’s management yet, and while it’s hard to see the new chairman Ferran Soriano being as approachable as his local predecessor Peter Sidwell was, Osterlund is not worried about being ignored.
“A group like Manchester City, they are a very intelligent group of people and they are not going to throw offside the 7,000 members we have. If they wanted to do that, they could have just made their own team. They wanted part of us. They didn't just want to create their own circus in the A-League.”
The pitfalls of changing a club’s identity are something Red Bull has found out the hard way. Its rebranded clubs in Europe and New York have all enjoyed unprecedented success, yet they have also inspired bad blood, including stadium protests and match boycotts. The clubs have picked up many new fans, though the depth of their passion is yet to be tested by any period of sustained failure.
One Heart supporter, Aaron Kovac, says he has already fallen out of love with the club. He's happy to see the A-League taken seriously enough for someone to drop $12m or so on a team, but for him, the club is now just some squillionaire's plaything. "They're not a team a town can truly call their own," he says.
To put it another way, Kovac believes they no longer have the fans’ best interests at heart. Though maybe that has been the case for a while. The club held on to John Aloisi long enough for them to get in to the record books for the league’s equal longest winless streak.
For all his faults, though, the inexperienced Aloisi must have saved the club a mint on coaching wages, and one of Heart’s selling points to City was its surprising financial health – the team that can barely score a goal and struggles to pull a crowd is one of the most profitable clubs in the competition.
It's not some AFL sympathiser's pipe dream to think supporters could have a strong voice at the club. There are few better advertisements for this model than the Champions League, strange as that may sound. At Barcelona and Bayern, the two dominant teams of recent years, supporters are more than just spectators, voting in presidents and exercising considerable influence over how the clubs are run. Both clubs are in the top five of Forbes’ most valuable clubs list.
Last year’s Champions League runners-up, Dortmund, also fit that mould, as do most clubs in the Bundesliga. That model is unlikely to become part of the A-League's plans in the immediate future, but nor is there any reason it should slavishly follow the Premier League in treating clubs as businesses with customers, rather than clubs with members.
City's attitude towards Heart fans will bring that tension into even sharper focus.
