King Power - Good or bad or both?

[shen]

Feel free to merge this thread if needed. I couldn't find a thread which focuses on a critical ethical discussion of the club's owners.

@MattP made a comment in the PL £1 bn cash TV row thread which emphasised the feeling I keep experiencing when King Power get brought up.

 

Most of us will be well aware that King Power haven't been picture perfect before or since they've been involved with Leicester City.

Yet it feels like they are a big white elephant on this forum, which no-one is willing to address.

 

They have obviously had a massive hand in the club's recent successes, mainly by virtue of the massive cash influx, which no doubt is the main reason for our fans to turn a blind eye towards any news/info that doesn't suit us.

How often have we not seen the "The owners have been great for us"-comment on here?

Their many charitable gestures do a lot for their public image in Leicester and England in general.

 

But are King Power and the Srivaddhanaprabhas really that good for us? If they are contributing to the PL elitism, are they any better than owners of other clubs we generally perceive as bad?

The off-shore holding companies to avoid paying taxes, the circumvention/breach of fair play rules (which the Football League to my knowledge are still investigating), the connections to shady powerful figures in their homeland and much more.

Maybe all these allegations and suspicions are not true, but there is no smoke without a fire it is said.

As fans and members of the club, it has to be our responsibility to scrutinise the owners and make sure they live up to a certain ethical and moral code.

 

I for one am quite skeptical of them, and growing increasingly so. If I take off the blue-tinted specs, I see them as another contributor to the collective undermining of football as the sport and community we have learned to love.

 

[Voll Blau]

A very fair post and pretty much how I see it. Expect this thread to be full of posts casting you off as ungrateful and claiming they "saved the club", as is usually the case any time they're criticised for anything they do on here.

 

It's the English fans' way to only scrutinise club owners when things go to shit, and all too often that comes too late.

[filthyfox]

Both.... o love the success and the way they fund the club adequately.  BUT when we were poor I could get a ticket on the cheap via a ST holder. Now I hae to pay the cost of a ticket (more in fact) to be put in a lottery.

[jayfox26]

If you cant beat them, join them. Id rather be successful and playing in the prem every season with our 'dodgy' owners than be sitting on the morale high ground in the championship. I think the morales in football ship sailed long ago! 

[Guest MattP]

I don't think anyone can doubt on the pitch it's been very good, aside from Sven managerial appointments have been excellent (lucky as well I think with regards to Claudio in hindsight) and they clearly enjoy having a good rapport with the fans given the amount of stuff they want to give to it, they care about PR which is more than can be said for many.

 

Behind the scenes it's very dodgy though, the charitable donations as far as I can see are on the football club's accounts anyway, not personally from the pocket of the Chairman, the tax avoidance is terrible, unacceptable for a company and people with that wealth, I still think the minute's silence for the Thai king was the worst thing they implemented, this was a man who imprisoned those who opposed him and oulawed freedom of speech yet we had to stand in respect like it was Mother Teresa.

 

I know they needed the coverage of them doing it but that was our (albeit far smaller) version of the England team in Berlin in 1938.

[kingcarr21]

Will always be viewed as bad until they bring in a proper Balti pie

[lgfualol]

I love them but they're dodgy as ****. 

[foxy boxing]

What would fans rather have given the choice success or a morally conscious club with ethics that mean we get left behind by more ruthless and cutthroat clubs!

[Guest MattP]

2 minutes ago, foxy boxing said:

What would fans rather have given the choice success or a morally conscious club with ethics that mean we get left behind by more ruthless and cutthroat clubs!

Is it actually a choice between the two? You can be ethical and successful.

[Innovindil]

Love what they've have done for our club, but they are undoubtedly dodgy. 

 

Aside from the moral side of it, long term it could come back to bite us. Did we ever get a final report on that ffp dodging nonsense from the championship years? 

[Ted Maul]

At the end of the day, football is changing for the worse across the board. Our owners' small contributions won't change anything.

 

It certainly fuels the negative views from fans of other clubs who remember the issues our administration caused.

 

However, as long as their actions are never going to impact negatively on the club and we continue to be successful, then so be it. Beats scratching around at the bottom of the Championship doing things the 'right' way.

[FLAN]

I saw them sponsoring elephant polo on the jack Whitehall arm his dad travel show on Netflix. If that helps 

[Kitchandro]

I don't really see how they're contributing to PL elitism, any more than any other owner. Football owners tend to have a lot of money and I expect them to fund the club. I don't consider owners of football clubs to bad because of this.

 

The owners I generally despise are the ones like Oyston, who will happily bankrupt a club for their own financial gain and even go as far as taunting the fans about it.

 

Or those that have no respect for a club and it's part in the community - Winkleman, Tan, Allam, etc, who will try to reinvent the club into something completely different, or even move it from it's home, and just tell the fans to accept it. This is one of the reasons I could never warm to our owners, with their insistence on replacing white with gold on our kits being the prime example. What these big shots don't realise is nothing is worth trading the traditions of the club for and any perceived link between these sort of changes and success is insane anyway.

 

I've also never accepted that they are men of honour, as some have claimed. They are guilty of the same lack of class a lot of owners have shown. Insisting on being the centre of attention during our greatest moment by parading the trophy annoyed me. The football club will always be about the players, management and the fans.

 

But more disappointing were two-faced acts like publicly backing Ranieri and then sacking him about 2 weeks later. Or sacking 3 fringe players for a sexual misdemeanour (they were all tarred with a racism brush which only actually applied to one of them) but not handing out the same punishment to a more senior player who commited a worse and violent crime. Presumably a business decision, but certainly not an honourable one.

 

As owners, I also hold them responsible for the other inner-workings of the club - ticket prices, position of safe standing, the suitability of the members of the board, etc. In these non-footballing matters, for lack of a better phrase, Leicester City FC have been found wanting ever since I started actively following them and things have arguably got worse under Vichai & Top's leadership.

 

There's no doubt that they have been good for the club from a footballing point of view. They have funded the team and the infrastructure well, though the idea that we can put our success down to that is rather farfetched. Whilst they have undoubtedly provided funds for managers in the past, we didn't really spend loads for a club of our size, aside from the time under Sven, and the majority of that money spent did not buy the players that contributed to our promotion, let alone our title win.

 

The legacy they will probably leave here with is the masterstrokes of appointing Nigel Pearson and Claudio Ranieri. These were, undoubtedly, the two biggest and best decisions they made, or will ever likely make.

 

 

[Kitchandro]

And I can't really say I'm bothered at all if they are trying to avoid paying taxes. Not from a moral point of view anyway. No one likes paying taxes. If they get caught and punished, so be it, that's their problem. I doubt it will massively affect us as a club.

 

FFP has always been a joke and should never have been brought it. If anything, it's that which contributes to elitism in football.

[shen]

18 minutes ago, MattP said:

I don't think anyone can doubt on the pitch it's been very good, aside from Sven managerial appointments have been excellent (lucky as well I think with regards to Claudio in hindsight) and they clearly enjoy having a good rapport with the fans given the amount of stuff they want to give to it, they care about PR which is more than can be said for many.

 

Behind the scenes it's very dodgy though, the charitable donations as far as I can see are on the football club's accounts anyway, not personally from the pocket of the Chairman, the tax avoidance is terrible, unacceptable for a company and people with that wealth, I still think the minute's silence for the Thai king was the worst thing they implemented, this was a man who imprisoned those who opposed him and oulawed freedom of speech yet we had to stand in respect like it was Mother Teresa.

 

I know they needed the coverage of them doing it but that was our (albeit far smaller) version of the England team in Berlin in 1938.

No one can question the success they've brought to the club. But your wording is interesting. Has it been good? If we did not get King Power as our owners and we watched our local rivals enjoying the success we have, based on foreign capital influx and unfair means, surely we would've felt it was destructive for the game of football.

 

22 minutes ago, jayfox26 said:

If you cant beat them, join them. Id rather be successful and playing in the prem every season with our 'dodgy' owners than be sitting on the morale high ground in the championship. I think the morales in football ship sailed long ago! 

 

12 minutes ago, foxy boxing said:

What would fans rather have given the choice success or a morally conscious club with ethics that mean we get left behind by more ruthless and cutthroat clubs!

... And as these comments show, we as fans of LCFC, seem to be more than willing to ignore ethics if it just brings us short term success. This stance, for me, opens a whole new can of worms which ultimately boils down to: Why do we, the fans, even support a football club if it is run in an obviously corrupt or unethical manner? And why doesn't that bother us?

[Tommeh]

Whilst they hit the absolute jackpot with what NP built (pretty much any middling 2nd tier clubs dream), fair play to sticking with him on both occasions (May '13 and Feb '15) and whether it was lucky or calculated genius the Claudio appointment turned out to be one of the best the game has seen in terms of bringing a man in to oversee the perfect storm and deal with things such as tactics and the media perfectly. In regards to the the titles themselves in 2014 and 2016 however I prefer to give both managers the overwhelming credit unlike some.

 

Since July 2016 however I've been massively opposed to them, I hate the endless KP branding exercise that goes on round the ground, the endless sponsorship, the appalling ticket prices and membership schemes, the awfully handled sacking of Claudio, the insistence in gold over white and the overwealming greed culture which seems to have swept across the club (Champions League ticket home prices being the main one, especially adding another fiver onto the Atletico tie, what the fuck was all that about?) I get the feeling they will currently squeeze everything they possibly can out of the fans when realistically our money is a drop in the ocean. Again however I don't hold that entirely on them, its quite obvious there's many pure business bodies operating behind the scenes, where margins and shareholders come first, not the fans. 

 

I'd say in the last 14 months there's been a few indications the club isn't quite the one I know and love.

[Kitchandro]

4 minutes ago, shen said:

No one can question the success they've brought to the club. But your wording is interesting. Has it been good? If we did not get King Power as our owners and we watched our local rivals enjoying the success we have, based on foreign capital influx and unfair means, surely we would've felt it was destructive for the game of football.

 

 

... And as these comments show, we as fans of LCFC, seem to be more than willing to ignore ethics if it just brings us short term success. This stance, for me, opens a whole new can of worms which ultimately boils down to: Why do we, the fans, even support a football club if it is run in an obviously corrupt or unethical manner? And why doesn't that bother us?

I'm still trying to work out what's unfair or unethical about it.

 

I think you're in danger of putting too much emphasis on money. I support a football team, it is the nature of the game that it is driven by money, it has to be somewhat when so many people watch it. I don't put any of our success down to outspending other teams because that's simply not the case.

 

Even if it was, every dog has it's day. We've had times when we've been skint, had to watch turgid football, watched our hated local rivals go on to great success, watched smaller clubs than us spend money on good players and watched tiny clubs win bug trophies whilst we were mediocre with only occassional, moderate success yet still had big crowds. Swings and roundabouts, it just happened for us in a different time when everyone talks about money and forgets that there's actually 11 men out there who need to do a job and win a game of football.

 

Going back to the above, I'm far more concerned with the colour of our kits than what our owners do in their spare time. Because it's football, it will always be football.

[David Guiza]

The morals and or ethics of the average football fan seemingly go out of the window when it comes to their own team, it's quite bizarre. For example, despite the glaring rumours about the Forest Chairman's past the majority of their fans base couldn't care less, as long as he brings success; and I really don't think they are alone in that respect - quite the opposite in fact. The same happened with Birmingham City throughout their turbulent ownership, and Man City also.

 

We are very lucky to have owners who keep a very low profile in many respects, but there are almost certainly aspects of the ownership that we should not be comfortable with. Whether it be the forced nature of the mourning of a notable human rights abuser with the minutes applause and constant adverts etc, or the somewhat controversial positioning of funds relating to the club we, as a whole, seemingly pretend not to notice.

 

It is interesting what Matt says above, questioning whether ethics and success should go hand in hand, as clear it realistically should. However, at times it does appear that you either have a fairly straight forward set up like Boro have with Steve Gibson and flirt on the fringes of relative success, or go all out and have somewhat questionable owners morally speaking. Nearly all of the top clubs in this country have, at some time, been called into question in that respect and I don't think we need to get started on the likes of Madrid or Milan.  

[STUHILL]

6 minutes ago, shen said:

No one can question the success they've brought to the club. But your wording is interesting. Has it been good? If we did not get King Power as our owners and we watched our local rivals enjoying the success we have, based on foreign capital influx and unfair means, surely we would've felt it was destructive for the game of football.

 

 

... And as these comments show, we as fans of LCFC, seem to be more than willing to ignore ethics if it just brings us short term success. This stance, for me, opens a whole new can of worms which ultimately boils down to: Why do we, the fans, even support a football club if it is run in an obviously corrupt or unethical manner? And why doesn't that bother us?

If everyone lived by these rules, then no one would use Facebook/Twitter, buy Apple/Microsoft products, drive VW/AUDI's, eat chocolate/drink coffee and so much more - as big corrupt mega billion pound companies are all involved in the advertising, production and selling of such products and services.

 

I wish all Billionaires and companies were morally responsible and didn't use shady practices to oust competition, dupe customers or authorities.. but that is not the world we live in and that will never change. 

 

I judge King Power purely on what they do for the club, the same way I have to judge/use other companies in my life. If I didn't, then there would be very few choices out there and I would be forever discovering what a shitty and corrupt world we live in. In this case, as with many others - Life is too short and voluntary ignorance is bliss! 

[Ted Maul]

9 minutes ago, shen said:

If we did not get King Power as our owners and we watched our local rivals enjoying the success we have, based on foreign capital influx and unfair means, surely we would've felt it was destructive for the game of football.

That's just jealousy mate, most football fans are the same. Fans of plenty of clubs have bemoaned their rivals enjoying success at the hands of foreign investment, only to be delighted when that investment arrives on their own doorstep.

 

There aren’t many clubs in the top couple of divisions who aren’t owned by a foreign billionaire these days, and most of them are shite. Like it or not, it’s a necessary evil if you want any sort of success in the modern era.

[Captain...]

They are billionaires from a country where corruption is rife, they were clearly favoured by the old regime in Thailand and probably pushed the boundaries in Thailand. Over here they are under a lot of scrutiny and nothing in there business with the club has been flagged up as dodgy. Legal ways to reduce to tax bill is morally wrong, but legal and if as a result we get these huge charitable donations I can let that slide. Especially as every other businessman and football owner is doing the same thing. FFP has still not been proven. They have clearly been good for the club and even more so when you consider the state of some other clubs and their owners.

[Bayfox]

Amazing what a few free beers and the odd donut can do for keeping people onside.

 

 

[shen]

@Kitchandro @Tommeh

 

I sympathise with your views, but one thing does strike me as odd. Both of you seem to accept/be OK with immoral/unethical actions they take, because it's quite common in the world of football today.

 

However, when it comes to tampering with traditions it's a different matter. Both of you mention the gold colour on the jerseys, but we all know that the colour of the kit has changed many times since the club was formed.

So is it because of what gold signifies to our owners that it grates? They're putting their wishes ahead of the fans'?

Does our support of the club depend on which colour their kits are?

 

[Tommeh]

5 minutes ago, shen said:

@Kitchandro @Tommeh

 

I sympathise with your views, but one thing does strike me as odd. Both of you seem to accept/be OK with immoral/unethical actions they take, because it's quite common in the world of football today.

 

However, when it comes to tampering with traditions it's a different matter. Both of you mention the gold colour on the jerseys, but we all know that the colour of the kit has changed many times since the club was formed.

So is it because of what gold signifies to our owners that it grates? They're putting their wishes ahead of the fans'?

Does our support of the club depend on which colour their kits are?

 

First of all Shen, superb topic. Refreshing to see a thread which doesn't call all our squad 'shit' or a list of players everyone would sign. 

 

With regards to the ethics, I'm not OK with them, I'd probably take the 4th post down from MattP as  one which covered my views best, I chose to focus on other areas which hadn't (at the time of writing) been addressed. 

 

Gold on the shirts although I mentioned it isn't a huge one on that list in the grand scheme of things, on some shirts its even looked pretty good. I respect we've had different trims and colours before (95/96 shirt was terrific) but we then reverted to type straight after, I think its more the principle of having it now on 3+ shirts now and it all seems to be getting drilled into us. We're being told how to support our club - this ties into the clappers, the club manufactured displays and applause for Thai kings etc. There seems to be very little appreciation for fan culture and fan involvement. Its a pay your money and accept it culture they've created for me. 

[StriderHiryu]

For us as fans and as a club they have been incredible. I personally think they are the best owners of any team in the league.

 

However, in terms of the "darker side" there is no doubt that it's there and it does make me uncomfortable. It's a hard one though because I think that anyone that climbs their way right to the very top as a successful businessman needs a degree of ruthlessness and "playing unfair." The KP group definitely have those traits but I'd argue it is one of the reasons why they have achieved so much with Leicester, even if it's not the most ethical of ways to succeed.