The name’s Broadus, Calvin Broadus. You can call me Snoop.
It’s unclear if this is the way Snoop Doggy Dogg aka Snoop Dogg aka Snoop Lion will introduce himself to the Swansea City manager Alan Sheehan when the time comes for the two men to chat, but it would hardly be outrageous in the context of Mr Broadus’s esoteric life.
It would also fit a moment when it feels as if every football club must be a storyline as well as delivering a starting XI each Saturday. What began in recent years with Sunderland’s documentary series has been taken on by Swansea’s Welsh rivals Wrexham, and clubs from Manchester City to Birmingham City have joined in this salesmanship dressed up as self-expression.
The understanding so many of us have that the reality of a football club is seen on the pitch, and that everything else, both good and bad, stems from there has been challenged.
We have always been aware of course that wealth can fuel a football club to produce a team of players who return the investment with success; and in turn the club grows again. But performances and results on the pitch are fundamental. Today, though, given how large and sprawling some clubs have become it can seem as if the 90 minutes are merely part of an overall weekly organisation production. What some of us must accept, if reluctantly, is that in certain ways this approach works.
And now there is Swansea City. In April the club that would finish 11th in their seventh consecutive season in the Championship announced, out of nowhere, that Luka Modric had become “an investor and co-owner”.
The Welsh club was founded at Vetch Field in 1912. It was owned then by the Swansea Gas Light Company, which seems apt, as in 2025 questioning our perception of Swansea City is excusable, particularly when Modric was subsequently joined on the board by Snoop Dogg.
Headlines flowed – a man called Dogg was linking up with a club whose fans, the “Jack Army”, are named after a famous local retriever. Then again, dogs and pounds often go together.
Suddenly Swansea’s 2025-26 home kit was being modelled by Snoop. In last month’s unveiling Mr Broadus casually addressed his 88 million followers on Instagram, informing them the new jerseys were out and on the shelves.
Three days ago the Swans’ revealed a new third kit, a handsome effort teeming with 1990s references – we are told. These references are to an era when Gulf Oil sponsored the club and the kit. That company owns the current sponsors, a coffee brand.
The details are for merchandising folk; what Swansea fans and others noted was the footballer unveiling this new product was not a current squad member, nor a Vetch Field legend. No, it was Modric, as casually as a west coast rapper entering the frame to hang the jersey on a clothes rail. The great midfielder doesn’t speak, he just looks you in the eye. For plenty of Swansea supporters that will be enough for their wallets, like their mouths, to fall open. Yes, Luka, here’s my £60.
And that is the point of profile: cash. As yer man Broadus, famously, knows.
With my mind on my money and my money on my mind.
At the beginning of April Swansea’s latest financial numbers, for 2024-25, showed a loss of £15.2 million (€17.6 million) – about £300,000 a week. Income was £21 million.
At the same time another Welsh club, from two divisions below, released their latest figures. Wrexham’s turnover in England’s fourth division was almost £27 million and their commercial income was £13 million. Bringing in more than a million a month in League Two will make other clubs’ executives take note. Swansea’s largely American ownership group did just that.
The economic benefits of the Netflixification of Wrexham are obvious. The issue will be, for others and them possibly, what happens when the “story” of the club outruns its reality on the pitch. That word throwing its shadow across football’s modern landscape and the media world it inhabits – “content” – can stretch only so far if results do not match hype.
Understandably, to some extent, Swansea are moving towards it – no ownership can sustain losing £300,000 a week forever and if an appearance from Snoop shift shirts, then so be it. If the USA is the target audience, and if it is large enough, Luka-Snoop can only help.
Back in Swansea, however, they know signing a goalscoring striker would transform Swansea more than any curated “narrative arc” or celebrity endorsement and not so long ago Swansea’s story was indeed on the pitch. They were dubbed “Swansea-lona” due to the patience and accuracy of a passing game honed under coaches such as Roberto Martinez and Brendan Rodgers. The Swans were promoted to the Premier League under Rodgers – Wilfried Bony scored 16 goals in his first Premier League season – and won a major trophy, the League Cup, under his successor Michael Laudrup.
But Laudrup left and no less than 10 permanent appointments followed, ranging from Bob Bradley to Steve Cooper. Sheehan, pushed forward from assistant to the last manager, Luke Williams, is the 11th.
Sheehan has parallel lines to straddle. Before Swansea’s opening game of the Championship season, at Middlesbrough, he spoke of the “noise” around the club. Enjoyably, the 38-year-old from Athlone did so in a quiet, dry way. Sheehan is not a drum-banger, in fact he said “I’d rather work on the team than, potentially, promoting me, which is neither here nor there.
“For me to be out there in the media hearing all about me, it’s not really my strategy.”
There is nothing Disney about Sheehan and a 20-year playing career that took him from Belvedere to Leicester City, Leeds, Notts County and quite a few others. At Luton Town, he began coaching and Sheehan worked at Southampton and Leeds before Swansea. He guided the Swans through an impressive end to last season.
Sheehan could have been sceptical, rattled or both by the arrival of Modric and Dogg. Instead he has welcomed them and declared “utmost respect”. He says he likes Snoop’s music and that it would be “narrow-minded” not to consider what the pair can bring to south Wales. There have been text messages with Modric with Sheehan joking the Milan-bound player was “unavailable to come here”.
We do not yet know what Swansea are or can be this season – they lost their first game, won the second and host Watford on Saturday – but Sheehan’s droll humour should be useful. Acknowledging the scale of Snoop’s personality, he said: “I need to work on mine; Snoop can maybe help me on that.”
