The Coca Cola Kid Colin Kazim-Richards
Between 2015 and 2019, Brighton and Hove Albion spent £229.45 million on new players. That could buy you over 218 million cans of Coca Cola down your local Waitrose – and yet as recently as 2005, the Albion had to rely on winning a competition sponsored by the drinks manufacture to afford a £250,000 signing from Bury by the name of Colin Kazim-Richards. This is the story of the Coca Cola Kid.
We begin in the summer of 2004. Coca Cola had just taken up sponsorship of the Football League from Nationwide. With a team of marketeers who managed to turn a jumped-up Eddie Stobart lorry into one of the highlights of Christmas, the company soon set their mind to how they could use the English professional league as a vehicle to promote their brand.
Throughout the 2004-05 season, we saw the Coca Cola logo changed into the colours of all 72 Football League teams. And it was beamed onto prominent advertising spots around the country. Genuinely, it was a big deal seeing “Brighton and Hove Albion” in blue and white splashed across Piccadilly Circus.
That wasn’t enough though and so midway through the campaign, Coca Cola launched a competition. Buy a Coke, enter the draw and you could win £250,000 for your club to spend on a player of their choice. There had never been anything like it.
Football clubs and supporters went mad for it. Clubs wanted the prize and therefore encouraged their supporters to buy as many bottles of Coca Cola as possible to give them a greater chance of winning; supporters for their part were desperate to be the ones who helped buy that striker who fired their team to promotion. It was the sort of competition that would have had Jamie Oliver and his anti-sugar agenda spinning in his grave.
Coca Cola received over 1.1 million entries for the competition. The winner was Brighton fan Aaron Berry and suddenly, Mark McGhee had an unexpected boost to his summer 2005 transfer budget – a quarter of a million pounds, a fee the size of which the Albion last spent on a player during their 1980s heyday 20 years previously.
Because Coca Cola wanted to promote the fact that they’d helped a club buy a player, one of the terms and conditions of the competition was that the signing had to be made by the end of August.
McGhee and Dick Knight didn’t need that long. They already knew who they wanted to make the first Coca Cola bought player – 18-year-old Colin Kazim-Richards from Bury.
Kazim-Richards had first been recommended to McGhee by a scout who’d watched the young forward playing for Bury’s Under 18s against Middlesbrough several months earlier.
He’d since gone onto score three goals in 30 appearances for the Shakers, attracting the interests of Premier League-bound Wigan Athletic and Brighton’s Championship rivals Stoke City and Leicester City.
Kazim-Richards was destined to leave Gigg Lane that summer. He knew about the interest from clubs higher up the pyramid and rejected a new deal with Bury, leaving him out of contract.
Because of his age, whoever signed him on a free would have had to pay a modest fee set out by a tribunal. With their long-standing interest, Brighton would surely have been in for him anyway.
The Coca Cola money now gave them an advantage – they could offer Bury cash up front to secure Kazim-Richards’ services before he became a free agent.
After some intense negotiations, that’s exactly what happened. Brighton (and Coca Cola) paraded Colin Kazim-Richards as an Albion player on June 30th 2005.
Expectations were high. Not only did Kazim-Richards have to deal with the pressure of being the first ever Coca Cola player, but he was also coming into a side who’d survived relegation by the skin of their teeth in 2004-05.
What’s more, Knight had begun his dangerous game of selling off the family silver and not replacing it. The Albion had been relatively safe at Christmas time until the sales of Danny Cullip and Darren Currie to Sheffield United and Ipswich Town were sanctioned with no real replacements coming in.
Dan Harding had now gone on a free to The Leeds United and top scorer Adam Virgo had been sold for £1.5m to Celtic. With Leon Knight yet to convince at Championship level and McGhee’s other striking options being Mark McCammon (last seen getting chucked off the team coach away at Burnley), Jake Robinson and Chris McPhee, Kazim-Richards found himself with a lot of goal scoring responsibility on his shoulders.
McGhee for his part tried to play it down. He said upon the christening of Colin Kazim-Richards as the Coca Cola Kid, “Since it was announced that we had won the money, I had been determined that the money should be invested and not spent without any return.”
“I think Colin represents exactly that: an investment. Colin is a player for the future of this club and hopefully we will benefit from this signing in the long term.”
Knight was a lot less restrained in his views. He told The Argus: “I don’t want to make undue comparisons with Bobby (Zamora), because that would be unfair on Colin and put too much pressure on him, but I get the same sort of feeling about him.”
The first ever player brought by Coca Cola? Tick. Expected to get the goals to keep a woeful Brighton squad up? Tick. Comparisons to Bobby Zamora? Tick. Poor Colin, he never stood a chance of living up to all that hype. But then again, he didn’t help himself either.
We did see flashes of brilliance in Kazim-Richards’ one season at the Albion. Withdean during the 2005-06 campaign was never likely to be the place for it to come out regularly though.
As predicted, the Albion endured a terrible year to finish stone cold bottom of the table. At times, frustration shone through for Kazim-Richards and he stroppily tore around the pitch like a petulant child.
Needless to say, this led to several disagreements with McGhee in a season in which the Albion boss would fall out with half his first team squad.
Despite which, Kazim-Richards still managed to finish top scorer with six goals from 44 appearances. Virtually all of those goals were worldies too – it says much that here we are, nearly 15 years on and Kazim-Richards’ stunning distance efforts against Cardiff City, Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United still stick in the memory from a season that most Albion fans would happily never think of again.
League One beckoned for the Albion and while many supporters were hoping that Colin Kazim-Richards would kick on at a lower level and fire Brighton to an immediate return to the Championship, both the Coca Cola Kid and McGhee had other ideas.
The writing was on the wall when £8000 signing from Braintree Town Alex Revell was preferred to Kazim-Richards up front in the opening game of the 2006-07 season away at Rotherham United.
Revell scored the only goal that day and Kazim-Richards responded to being on the bench by handing in a transfer request. So desperate were Brighton to get rid of him that they accepted a knock-down fee of £150,000. Or 142,857 cans of Coke.
While it was never confirmed just how much of the Coca Cola money the Albion spent on Kazim-Richards, it seems unlikely we made much profit on him at all. So much for McGhee’s proclamations of investments and future returns. And the less said about Knight’s comparisons to Zamora, the better.
Kazim-Richards’ destination was even more surprising than how little we sold him for – the Coca Cola Kid was heading for the Premier League with newly promoted Sheffield United.
Being the classy guy that he is, Kazim-Richards gave an interview to The Argus burying Brighton and McGhee following his departure.
“The gaffer talked a good game when I came and so did I,” Kazim-Richards said. “But I got subbed off for no particular reason. I came for the playing opportunity and didn’t really play that much. I was still top scorer with six goals.”
“Now I am at a really good club that is going places, no disrespect to Brighton. I have spoken to Neil Warnock and I have got a real opportunity, I’m not here just to make up the numbers, but to play.”
Warnock clearly felt he could coax more out of the mercurial forward than McGhee had managed. He couldn’t – although the Blades did at least manage to turn a profit, selling Kazim-Richards on to Fenerbache for £1.2m (1,142,857 cans of Coke) following one Premier League season in which he managed one goal in 29 games.
This being Kazim-Richards, it was of course a spectacular strike bent into the back of the net from 25 yards out on the left against Bolton Wanderers at Bramall Lane.
Most Brighton fans forgot about Kazim-Richards after that until the summer of 2008. England had failed to qualify for the European Championships in quite spectacular style, yet interest in the tournament in Sussex was piqued by a familiar looking striker now playing for Turkey who went under the name Kazim-Kazim.
Yes, it was the Coca Cola Kid Colin Kazim-Richards. From not good enough for Brighton in League One to helping Turkey go all the way to the semi finals in Switzerland and Austria, where they were eliminated 3-2 at the hands of Germany.
That sums up Kazim-Richards’ bizarre career really. Not many players have left Brighton and gone onto have the journey that he has .
Kazim-Richards has rattled through some of the biggest names in some of the most football crazy countries on Earth – both Turkish giants Fenerbache and Galatasaray, Toulouse in France, Olympiakos in Greece, Feyenoord in the Netherlands, Corinthians in Brazil and Pachuca in Mexico. He’s even had a spell in the Scottish Pub League with Celtic.
The last time we saw Kazim-Richards in Brighton wasn’t without incident, either. It came on Tuesday 12th February 2013 while he was on loan at Blackburn Rovers from Fenerbache and he decided to mark the occasion by making a series of homophobic gestures to the Amex crowd throughout the 1-1 draw.
As a result, Kazim-Richards became the first ever British football to be taken to court accused of homophobia. He was found guilty, fined £750 and ordered to pay costs of £1,445 (2090 cans of Coca Cola). Kazim-Richards claimed that pretending to insert something up his rectum was “just banter.”
By the time Colin Kazim-Richards was stood in the dock at Brighton Magistrates, Coca Cola had long finished their association of the Football League.
They did continue to run variations of the Win a Player competition throughout their six seasons however, with Southampton claiming the prize the following year and signing Bradley Wright-Phillips.
Hull City won it in 2007 although nowhere online seems to detail who they actually the signed. The format was changed after that anyway, with Coca Cola instead deciding to give money to every Football League member on a proportional basis worked out on how many entries each club received.
The £250,000 random top prize remained, but with funding for everyone the competition lost its sparkle (or should that be fizz?) a little.
And none of the subsequent winners – Wright-Phillips or the unknown Hull player – would be associated with the drinks brand in quite the same way as Kazim-Richards.
In recent years, it’s an image that he’s been desperate to shake off. Colin Kazim-Richards wants to be known as more than the Coca Cola Kid. We don’t know why. It’s surely better than the nomadic striker with an attitude problem who made homophobic gestures towards his former fans.
He was always different, though.
