KUALA LUMPUR – As Kuala Lumpur City FC’s financial hopes go up in smoke, former Kuala Lumpur Football Association (KLFA) president Khalid Samad has called on Kuala Lumpur MPs from Pakatan Harapan (PH) to unite and save the club.
Being the only football club from Kuala Lumpur that competes in the Super League, the City Boys have faced several financial crises over the past two years.
The club suffered a severe financial blow after Rinani Group Bhd, one of the club’s biggest stakeholders, reduced its sponsorship to 10% from 51% in 2022.
In November last year, the club’s chief executive officers, Stanley Bernard and Khalid, took separate loans worth RM300,000 to pay their players, whose salaries were overdue by several months.
It was reported that KL City’s financial woes reached a boiling point after their skipper Paulo Josue alleged that he had not received his salary for seven months and is currently surviving on his savings.
Khalid, who held the KLFA presidency from 2019 until March this year, said he plans to form a KL City fan club with the youth members from his political party (Amanah) with the support of Kuala Lumpur MPs.
For the record, Amanah is part of the PH coalition, which won a total of 10 MP seats (Kepong, Batu, Wangsa Maju, Segambut, Setiawangsa, Bukit Bintang, Lembah Pantai, Seputeh, Cheras, and Bandar Tun Razak) in the 2022 general elections.
The seats consist of MPs from both Parti Keadilan Rakyat and DAP, with five seats each.
“We are planning to form a fan club using our Amanah youths in Kuala Lumpur, and I will be addressing my plan with PH MPs during our meeting next week. Our goal is to make sure those who are living in KL get to know more about the club, and we need to start doing our part to help the club gain proper revenue.
“By having fans come to watch the games in the stadium, the club can get more money, and they will be able to pay their players.
“This initiative also aligns with PH’s objectives, as they always wanted to connect with the youth. Hence, it would be great if the MPs could use KL City as a way for them to connect with the youth.
“I’m also going to discuss with the MPs about sponsoring about 300 free tickets for a few games for their people from the constituencies. Since our coalition has 10 constituencies, we can easily bring in 3,000 supporters to the Kuala Lumpur Football Stadium for each game.
“I hope that through this initiative, we can get more people to come to the stadium to support the team and watch them play in the future. It’s sad to see that nowadays we have more away fans coming to watch their team play compared to the home fans,” said Khalid when met at a press conference today.
For the record, Kuala Lumpur Football Stadium has a capacity of 18,000 spectators.
At the same time, Khalid, who is also former federal territories minister and current Amanah communications director, said that he will discuss his initiative with Youth and Sports Minister Hannah Yeoh in the coming days.
“I have not discussed with Hannah about the initiative yet, but I don’t see any reason why she wouldn’t support it,” Khalid added.
KL City FC currently ranks fifth in the Super League with four points from three matches. – July 17, 2024