How Cardiff City became the EFL's latest crisis club

As the full-time whistle blew, the strength of feeling was clear for all to hear.

While players and coaching staff mourned Cardiff City’s relegation to League One at the end of last season, the fans voiced their dissatisfaction, with loud chants of “Vincent Tan, get out of our club” reverberating around the stadium. The Bluebirds’ Malaysian owner may have arrived in the Welsh capital in 2010 with big – and occasionally controversial – plans to establish Cardiff as a Premier League club, but those ambitions have looked fanciful for several years.

After finishing rock bottom of the Championship, City are now experiencing life in the third tier for the first time in 22 years. Relegation was the latest big dip in Tan’s 15-year ownership, which has resembled a rollercoaster ride laced with tragedy, dissension and glimpses of success.

Cardiff City have taken a nosedive in recent years

“The warning signs have been there for a while,” says WalesOnline reporter Glen Williams. “Since they came out of the Premier League [in 2019], they’ve finished in a lower league position every season bar one and have gone through eight managers, if we include the interims. “They just seem to be always sticking their fingers in the hole to stop the water coming out. It’s about stopping the immediate problem with no sort of foresight.”

The statistics back that up. Cardiff have won only 41 league matches in the past three full campaigns, a run that included a 12th-place finish in 2023-24, achieved with an expected-points tally that would have seen them end up in the bottom three. It’s a far cry from the side that won automatic promotion to the Premier League twice in six years during the 2010s.

Last season was a perfect illustration of the various issues. After drawn-out negotiations to extend the contract of incumbent boss Erol Bulut during the summer, the Bluebirds took just one point from their opening seven matches to make their worst ever start.

Bulut was sacked in September and despite rallying under interim Omer Riza, Cardiff took nearly two months to give him the job permanently, by which time the new manager bounce had ended. With relegation beckoning, Riza was then sacked with only three games left, leaving caretaker Aaron Ramsey – still a member of the squad, but injured – unable to save them from the drop.

The sense among fans is that while other clubs have morphed with the demands of modern football, Cardiff have paid the price for standing still. “It’s a club that hasn’t adapted with the times,” laments Ben Price, who co-hosts fan podcast View from the Ninian.

“It’s a real old-style club, with no real football knowledge at board level, and it’s all put on the manager to do it. “When that manager doesn’t work out, you’re sacking him and rebuilding a team under the new manager’s image – and you see what that leads to. It’s a constant battle to rejig the team and rebuild under a new manager.”

Much of that opinion has stemmed from a lack of football structure at the club. Tan sits at the top of the tree, aided by chairman Mehmet Dalman and CEO Ken Choo, with nobody else in place between the trio and a revolving door of managers. With no predefined style or evident philosophy, it’s made for a scattergun approach.

“In recent years, we’ve swung from the likes of Neil Harris to Mick McCarthy, then Sabri Lamouchi and Erol Bulut – they’re all completely different,” explains Williams. “They buy players to fit certain formations and different styles of play, and there are no boots on the ground for the day-to-day running of the football operation to ensure a smooth transition between these managers.”

The Bluebirds have been without any sort of sporting director since their first campaign in the Premier League in 2013/14, when head of recruitment Iain Moody – brought in by then-manager Malky Mackay – was suspended for allegedly overspending by £15m in the summer transfer window.

Moody was temporarily replaced by 23-year-old Kazakh Alisher Apsalyamov – the son of a friend of Tan’s, who’d been on work experience at the club, before an issue with his work visa meant he had to leave. Since then, Tan has retained control.

“It’s something I and other journalists have brought up, and fans bring up in forums all the time,” Williams says, regarding the lack of a sporting director. “Dalman has said a number of times that he would be open to a director of football or somebody to run football operations on a day-to-day basis and he’s put that to Tan, but Tan has been reluctant because he got burned by that when they had one the last time.

“It’s curious because Tan also owns a club called KV Kortrijk in Belgium, who do have a director of football. That confuses some fans.”

The strategy hasn’t always failed, though. The promotion in 2013 was the first time that Cardiff had played in the top flight for 51 years and, even though they went straight back down, they returned in 2018 under Neil Warnock. Add a League Cup final appearance in 2012 and Tan did oversee one of the best periods in the club’s history.

But those successes were tainted by off-field issues. The infamous rebrand that saw City’s traditional blue shirt changed to red and the bluebird on the club crest replaced with a red dragon caused uproar among fans, while the continuing legal fight with Nantes related to the transfer of Emiliano Sala leaves a sour taste for many. The striker died in a plane crash while travelling to begin life in Wales in 2019, in a transfer from the French club. So, how is Tan viewed among fans?

“It’s complicated,” Price answers. “Some fans are apathetic towards him, a lot don’t like him – and I’m in the middle. I get frustrated with him, but I don’t think he’s a bad bloke. “You look at what he’s done and Tan should be a hero at Cardiff City. But his actions just let him down.”

Relegation to League One hasn’t helped, despite a promising start to the season. Neither has Tan’s absence from the Cardiff City Stadium, though he insists he “watches every game”, from wherever he is in the world. The hope among fans is that this latest setback gives the club the jolt they need to address key problems and make a quick return to the Championship, under new boss Brian Barry-Murphy.

“This is the sliding doors moment for the club,” Price continues. “Is this when it rebuilds and kicks on? The one thing the club has done right is investing in the academy; we’ve got some really promising youth prospects coming through – the Colwill brothers, Cian Ashford, Isaak Davies, Ronan Kpakio – and hopefully getting into the first team. “If the club can reset and put more focus on youth, we could come back stronger with a vision for the first time under this ownership. Or we could end up like Bolton, Wigan or Reading. As we all know, the longer you’re in League One, the harder it is to get out of.”