AND YOU THOUGHT VINCENT TAN WAS BAD…
Pink stadium, pink shirt, selfies on the bench and a new club acronym of PQPTRWFC. Well, Kelantan’s new sponsor didn’t invest £3.5 million for nothing
If Cardiff City fans think they had things tough with their Malaysian investor, it could easily have been a whole lot worse. At least he didn’t want to paint the stadium pink.
We’re not sure what it is about football supremos from that part of the world, but they like a colour change. Vincent Tan famously put himself at loggerheads with Bluebirds fans by changing the home shirt from blue to red, but then he was the owner.
At Kelantan, Datuk Seri Hasmiza Othman is merely a sponsor, but that hasn’t stopped her from making changes to add a more feminine touch to pretty much everything at the Malaysian top-flight club.
Datuk Vida, as she’s known, owns a company selling beauty products that lighten skin tone. So when she bailed out the club in a £3.5m deal at the start of the year, one of the first things she did was bring in a new tight-fitting kit made of special thread that whitens the skin and even helps players get slimmer. Supposedly that’s achieved by ‘offering an anti-perspirant function’ and ‘promoting blood circulation’. We’ll take her word for it.
There’s only one problem. One of the kits is pink and so is the ground, after Datuk Vida gave the Sultan Muhammad IV Stadium a new look (below).
To push another arm of her business, she also changed the club’s nickname from The Red Warriors to the Pamoga Qu Puteh The Red Warriors, since abbreviated to PQPTRWFC. Catchy, eh?
“We needed investment,” Kelantan fan Firdaus Hashim tells FFT. “We got that, but we seem to have sold our soul.”
And there was more, as Vida introduced pre-match spas for players and insisted on sitting in the dugout. “It’s unusual,” says Australian defender Jon Mckain. “We thought it was a joke at first.” It was only when Vida started taking selfies that the league authorities felt they had to step in, reminding her that mobile phones are not allowed on the sidelines.
Any more rule-breaking and she’ll be shown the red card – although she’ll probably find a way to turn that pink, too.