At the weekend, I was given a pretty devastating answer to a familiar question.
I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that I’m travelling around parts of Asia just now. Often, local people will ask about Glasgow and Scotland and one of the first things that I want to tell them about is Celtic.
So far, I’ve spoken to people in various places who have at least been aware of who Celtic are but due to the lack of TV coverage, most people haven’t saw much of us.
Yesterday, the answer I was given was “No, I’ve never heard of Celtic, we only get the English premiership on TV”
That was in Malaysia and I’m sure there will be plenty of people here who know about our club. But there’s too many that don’t.
Unless I’ve got a good wifi connection, which is quite rare – I’m not staying in top end accommodations, I can’t get to see any Celtic games. The same will apply to the local people.
Unless they actively seek out a Celtic game, they wont get to watch us. Given that more and more people don’t know who we are, it’s going to be pretty impossible to expect them to look for us.
One of the ways that people in Asia will recognise and get to know about us by seeing us in the Champions League but even at that, Champions League matches are on deep during the night here because of the time differences.
Another way would be for Celtic to market the team in Asia. We’ve had a few Japanese players and two Chinese players in the last 10 years or so but football isn’t big in China.
I was asking someone about this and they said there just isn’t enough space to build football pitches and the Chinese are far more interested in basketball than football.
Through the course of my trip, I’ve saw a few guys wearing our tartan strip in Vietnam, a kid in Cambodia wearing the same strip and a tiny child in a place called Kampong Cham wearing the hoops.
I’ve saw a guy in Myanmar (Burma) with a t-shirt on which had a Celtic badge and I’ve saw a copy of our shirt for sale in another part of Cambodia. A small number of people know about us but in comparison to the EPL teams, they are massively outnumbering us now.
Kampog Cham is a fairly small town on the edge of the Mekong river so if people there are buying Celtic strips for their children, there must be a few who know about us.
The question is why do so few know about Celtic now? Part of it is because the English league is so well marketed. It’s almost everywhere from small TVs in shops to public squares and food courts.
A high percentage of motorbikes will have a seat cover or something related to an EPL team.
People all over the place are wearing Liverpool, Chelsea, Man Utd, Man City and Arsenal tops.
From what I can gather, people throughout Asia love their football. Especially European football. The people I have met don’t know that we are a former European cup winner. They are amazed to hear that we can fill a 60,000 seater stadium in such a small country.
They are even more surprised to hear a list of some of the teams and players who have walked off our pitch, defeated, at full time.
I don’t subscribe to sky but I believe they are a big reason as to why Celtic are no longer such a well known team. Another factor, I believe, is the people who run the SFA and SPFL are not selling the game at all.
They continually tell us that Scottish football is on it’s backside because Rangers died. If the people who run our game can’t or refuse to sell it until a competitive team wearing a blue shirt are involved then Celtic must go out and sell the club instead.
We’ve been to the US and Australia over the years. What’s to stop us going to, for example Cambodia, Vietnam or Myanmar?
Surely, we could sell the broadcasting rights of our games to an Asian TV company. We get virtually nothing from Sky anyway so selling it for a similar amount or more wouldn’t be that difficult.
If not the rights to live games, what about programs with language translations telling the people about Celtic? Along with some recent games? Or highlights.
Some may be reading this and asking why we need to be known in Asia? Part of it is pride in our team. It’s frustrating when people no longer know about us and it’s almost impossible to see our games. We want to known everywhere. Also a lot of Asian countries economies are picking up so in maybe 5 – 10 years time, a lot more people from these countries will be in a position to support a new team.
Why shouldn’t it be Celtic? Lets face it, in terms of crowd, stadium, history etc we are far better than what most of the EPL can offer. The only thing that we can’t beat the EPL teams on is money but football can and should be more than just money.
What are your experiences of Celtic in Asia and how could the club increase it’s profile?
Keep in touch and share your views with @steven1888
