Category: Culture

Bill-ing a united Hougang

BY ZAKARIA ZAINAL
BY ZAKARIA ZAINAL

Bill Ng is building a community by making sure the bills are paid at his football club, Hougang United

Let’s get this out of the way: Bill Ng may have pulled out his bid for Scottish football giants Glasgow Rangers, but the businessman says he has not given up hope on buying it. The man, who has been making the news with a bid for the financially troubled club and suddenly dropping out of the race when he was the only contender left, says he is bidding his time to see how the club would respond to the latest developments.

Meanwhile, it is business as usual at Hougang United, the football club in Singapore that he took over as its chairman in the middle of 2009. Once perennial cellar-dwellers in the S-League for over a decade, the club’s fortunes have transformed since Bill took over. It is now a mid-table club that reached the Singapore League Cup final last year, and more than once during our interview, he declares Hougang will fight for top honours next season. Currently, the team is 8th out of 13 teams in the league.

The improved performance on the pitch has also been matched by what’s happening around it. Hougang United’s home is in Hougang Stadium, which sits inside a public housing estate. On most days, the stadium’s stands are empty while residents fill the tracks, jogging and walking to keep fit. This is reversed on match days, as residents turn up in orange and black, the club’s official colours, all ready to support their team, The Cheetahs.

Hougang’s residents didn’t always have a football team to rally around. When the stadium was set up in 1987, it was simply a sports facility for the neighbourhood. It was only two years after Singapore formed its own professional soccer league in 1996, the S-League, that a team was assigned to adopt Hougang as its home, Marine Castle United Football Club. Over the next decade, Hougang’s residents found little to cheer about for a club that struggled to climb out of the bottom of the league and changed its identity to Sengkang Marine then Sengkang Punggol Football Club.

By the time Bill took over as chairman in 2009, the club had a reported debt of $1.3 million dollars. But Bill had come in with a reputation of buying over another financially-troubled football club Tiong Bahru United and successfully bringing it from the third division of the nation’s semi-professional league to the first. Although, some were also wary of Bill’s of his motivations. “I came into football because I was influenced by the love my two sons have for the sport and I have to admit I’m not a football man,” he said during an interview with Singapore newspaper TODAY in December 2010. “When I came in, I didn’t even know what the offside rule was and my sons had to teach me.”

Throughout our interview, it was clear that Bill took up the job as yet another opportunity to successfully restructure another company — it’s what he does for a living in his private equity firm Financial Frontiers. He talks at length at how he has tried to get rid of excesses in the club and find new forms of revenue. To make sure the club would be self-sustaining, he also hired people whom not necessarily were football fans, but knew how to run it like a financial institution. At one point, he even throws out his sales pitch: “All businesses are good businesses. It only fails because of the human element.”

Despite speaking at length about finances, Bill says it is not enough to turnaround a club. Rather, Hougang United is enjoying a revival because it has gotten people involved in it. “Money is of course the necessary condition for running the club, but it doesn’t mean pumping in fresh money is sufficient, you need the people and the passion,” he says.

This he found in a batch of young players and a new coach, ex-national team footballer Aide Iskandar. As changes were made on the pitch, Bill also worked hard to reach out to the wider community. Last year, the club was rebranded Hougang United, giving the new owner an opportunity to start afresh. It also allowed the club to forge an identity with its stadium and its surrounding neighbourhood of the same name. The club also began working with the neighbouring town councils to promote the club’s matches to the residents, and the schedule of upcoming games started appearing on the lift lobbies of the nearby public housing estates. For its games, Hougang United also began inviting orphanages and nearby schools to attend their games to watch Hougang United play. This year, in June, the club is also holding its first-ever Junior Challenge Trophy soccer tournament for students under-10 and under-12, a way for the club to spot new talent and introduce itself to young children.

Perhaps the most significant outreach program for the club is establishing an official fan club, the “Hougang HOOLs” (Hougang Only One Love). It started as a grassroots initiative by friends of then coach Aide, but Hougang United soon recognised it as its official satellite organisation, giving it resources to organise events and promote the club. It is crucial to tap on the people’s passion to keep the resource-strapped club alive, says Bill. “We are only good at certain things. By giving these fans rewards and resources, they help to promote the club and they are the experts, helping us manage our websites,” he says. “Suddenly, all these guys are empowered over night.”

Over the last two seasons, the Hougang HOOLs have built up a noisy reputation, standing and singing throughout the game — a rare sight for a league that struggles to get supporters despite being a football-crazy city. Most Singaporeans would rather stay up late to watch their dose of European football games on television rather than turn up at their neighbourhood stadium to catch a live S-League game.

In a way, Bill wanted to acquire a European club so that he could bridge this disparity, and “fast forward” Hougang United and the Singapore footballing community to Western standards. He imagines exchanges of players and staff and even access to Rangers 5.5 million fans, slightly more than the population of Singapore. This dream of uniting communities of people via football all started with the now oft-heard story of how the man in his 50s fell in love with the game after watching Rangers win the 1972 European Cup Winners’ Cup. “It was really gorgeous, seeing the crowd cheer, the ‘wow’ factor really registered for years,” he says. “Football can bring people from all walks of life together, it’s a sports for the masses.”

At this point, Hougang United has yet to convince people in its community to fill even the 2,500 seater stadium during its matches. However, Bill is convinced all he needs is time. The original plan when he took over the club was to be an interim chairman to get it back in the black again, he reveals, but watching it grow and seeing the community’s response over his close to three years with it has convinced him to stay for the long-term. For a very brief moment during the interview, Bill shows a glimpse of how Hougang United means more than just a financial restructuring challenge to him. Now, he just needs to convince the rest of the community to united around his football club too.

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A feature written for FIVEFOOTWAY magazine’s issue on PLAY

Ethics Can Feed You Meh?

That the project “Ethics for the Starving Designer” is named as such challenges how most designers see ethics in their profession: a non-issue when you need to finish a project to earn your keep. That is the dilemma which got David Goh, a final-year design communication student at Lasalle, started on this final-year project. After months of research and interviews with students, lecturers and practitioners in Singapore’s design industry, he has come up with a 21-point code of ethics for designers that you can now view online and at his on-going exhibition at Lasalle till Friday.

I checked it out this afternoon and was surprised to find it less contentious that it sounds. To me, the word “ethics” connotes some kind of expectation of saint-like behaviour, but David’s code is open and allows a certain degree of interpretations on how ethical you want to be.

That is a realistic approach, considering how we each have different beliefs, but I was disturbed by point 13 of the manifesto:

“Where my financial, professional and personal commitments would allow it, I will say no to all projects that I deem to be overtly immoral and harmful to society.”

Such a clause almost allows one to get away with almost anything, and in my discussions with David, we concluded that this is a pragmatic response to surviving in the profession. But on second thoughts, I think it also sends the wrong message that ethics is a luxury designers can think of only they have made it financially and professionally.

It is exactly such thinking that probably explains why this project has received little attention from Singapore designers thus far — why rock the boat with ethics when you’re doing well as a designer? David said most responses he has gotten about his project have come from overseas thus far, although he hopes more Singapore designers will engage him on this issue.

But that said, I don’t think Singapore designers aren’t ethical. Many of the manifesto’s points are gut instinct decisions that designers often make, but it’s never been really framed here in the issue of ethics. However, I do agree with David that designers should start this discussion on ethics, and one reason is because it tacitly acknowledges what David points out in point two of his manifesto:

“I recognize that graphic design is a powerful tool… for communication, behavioural change and manipulation. As such, I will treat it with utmost respect and care.”

This validates David’s call for “Ethics for the Starving Designer”, keeping the profession ethical is how to ensure designers will continue to be trusted to solve problems and provide services for the world it operates in.

Expanding the world of Graphic Design

Designers in Singapore today seem to show signs of pushing the profession beyond just a commercial tool. Over the last few months, we have seen the launch of several initiatives like “We Design Change”, “Ethics for the Starving Designer” and even a television programme, “Invest In Me”, where designers and design play a pivotal role in making the world a better place.

While I am still undecided on where I stand on this (at this point, still skeptical), I was fortunate to have been able ask Kevin Finn of Open Manifesto this question when he spoke at The Conqueror Awards ceremony in Singapore in early March. So can design change the world? No, he said, it all depends on context. Kevin raised the example of the AK-47, which is a well-designed machine, but when used as a weapon it becomes something bad for the world. This is an issue GOOD Magazine wrote about some years back as well.

Uncommon Life of Common Objects

If context is key, that is the world around design is what matters, then these two design books I’ve recently read help to push our thinking and discussion towards this direction. One is Akiko Busch’s The Uncommon Life of Common Objects (2004), and the other is Graphic Design Worlds / Words (2011), a publication based on an exhibition organised last year by Milan’s Triennale Design Museum.

Busch’s book is a collection of essays on design and the everyday life. The casual and accessible read takes you through 13 objects most of us are familiar with, such as a camera, a refrigerator, a bagpack. Each uses the object as a starting point to understand the people who use them, the world it exists in, its history, the culture and even politics behind the designs. More than once, Busch brings you so far away from talking about the actual design of the object to core of what it means, but when she concludes, you find yourself even closer to the design than ever. Perhaps, she describes her approach in her writing about design best, “You could say I write about design because I am fascinated by the relationships people forge with things and by the inevitability of how we engage in play with our material possessions.”

Graphic Design Worlds:Words

Coming at design with the same idea, but from the designers’ perspective is Graphic Design Worlds / Words, which is a collection of questions-and-answers with over 30 of Europe and America’s leading design studios and critics, including Max Bruinsma, Steven Heller, Experimental Jetset, and Erik Kessels. The theme of “Worlds” is open enough to allow expansive conversations, and the collection is not loose. Graphic design is examined as both “inner” — the worlds designers create — and “outer”, the world that design exists in. Some of the quotable quotes you’ll find in this book include:

“The designer is never the subject, but always the filter” — Metahaven

“Graphic design is turning language into objects” — Experimental Jetset

“Design is like channeling” — Radim Pesko

This book came out of an exhibition held last January to March that was very well-documented, including a blog A Diary of an Exhibition as well as videos too.

It was a fortunate stroke of serendipity that I ended up reading the two books not too far after another, giving me insights into the design world and  world design is in. While I am still skeptical as to how much design can expand into the world, I am convinced that the world of design had to expand its thinking to have any chance of doing so.