On Sunday evening, an aging Thai rock star with hooped earrings, his signature bandana and a wispy mustache will be at the home of English soccer to present the Carabao Cup to either Arsenal or Manchester City.
His prominence will baffle many soccer fans, not to mention some of the players celebrating the first silverware of the season at London’s Wembley Stadium.
However, in Thailand, the 63-year-old Yuenyong Opakul is a legend.
Photo: AFP
He is the lead singer of the band Carabao and cofounder of the energy drink company now sponsoring the English Football League (EFL) cup.
Better known as Aed Carabao, he helped catalyze the band’s massive following into consumers of high-caffeine drinks that now outsell Red Bull in Thailand.
With an eye on new markets, he has plowed cash into English soccer, hoping for a fast-track to global brand recognition.
The company has spent £30 million (US$41.8 million) to sponsor Chelsea’s training kit and a further £18 million on a three-year EFL cup contract, as well as paying to have its name emblazoned on Reading FC’s strip.
It has been a “very successful” investment so far, Aed said.
“English people are very focused on football. They didn’t know us before, but people are talking about the brand now,” he said while sitting in his large garden in a Bangkok suburb.
Thai money and English soccer have had a strong chemistry ever since billionaire former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra bought Manchester City in 2007.
Thailand’s duty-free magnate Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was next in, buying Leicester City for about £40 million in 2010 and clearing the club’s large debts.
Six years later the Midlands minnows stormed to the Premier League title, the players celebrating in shirts stamped with Vichai’s “King Power” brand.
Sheffield Wednesday are owned by Dejphon Chansiri of the Thai Union family — the world’s biggest tinned tuna producers — while Singha beer has partnered with Manchester United.
A commercial link with English soccer guarantees swift “international exposure,” said Pavida Pananond, an academic at Thammasat University’s Business School in Bangkok. “This strategy is not new. Red Bull has done it before with Formula 1 and extreme sports.”
Aed is no stranger to brand-building.
The one-time architecture student who studied in the Philippines — hence the band’s Tagalog name — has spun fame and fortune from his distinctive country-rock style, rasping voice and acerbic lyrics skewering corruption, inequality and forces of reaction.
He designed the skull-and-horns Carabao logo, which is across band paraphernalia, and even copyrighted a hand sign that represents the eponymous buffalo.
The band emerged in the early 1980s with an unabashedly pro-democracy agenda following a decade of political turbulence when crackdowns killed hundreds of student activists.
Several songs were banned by authorities, gifting Aed something of a bad-boy reputation.
However, age and commercial success has diluted Aed’s taste for controversy, more so in the social media age when junta-run Thailand’s sharply polarized politics tend to chew up anyone who speaks out.
Carabao is a colorful name for a trophy that has traditionally relied on more parochial sponsors, including Britain’s milk board and Rumbelows, a now-defunct white-goods retailer.
The Thai tie-up also endured an inauspicious start.
The EFL in June last year was forced to apologize after error-strewn graphics appeared on their online broadcast of the first-round draw for the Carabao Cup.
The third-round draw stirred more consternation after it was held in Beijing, demanding a pre-dawn wake-up by British fans to follow it live.
However, the timings reflected Carabao’s relentless marketing push, concerned first with seeking a foothold in China’s massive market.
As he prepares to travel to London for the Cup final, the genial singer is in similarly uncompromising mood.
“I’ll be dressed cool ... maybe in a suit because it’s cold, but everything else the same,” he said.
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