We have an important announcement for you today…
Short summary
We regret to announce that we have decided to discontinue all activities related to Czech football. In recent weeks, we feel that our brand has been severely damaged by the many scandals and behind-the-scenes machinations behind Czech football.
For a long time we didn’t deal with the background of Czech football because it didn’t concern us directly. The advertising on the jerseys and stadium worked well and met our expectations. But we’ve already picked up the first clues that it’s all damaging our brand, so we need to take action…
In our business, even the slightest mistake is very costly. Currently, more than one-fifth of Czech websites go to our datacentres, which is more than the other three competitors combined. This was not easy to achieve. Customers expect their services to run non-stop with no interruptions. Any security flaw can completely destroy your reputation for years. Trust is the most important thing we have. Customers expect you to protect their data not only from the pitfalls of the internet, but also from the evils of the state apparatus. We have to be clean. No one can doubt us. They have to trust us. Then how could they have their critical data in our country…
There are things that have been happening in football for a long time that we disagree with. We believe that it is impossible for any company that prides itself on its reputation to support Czech football, which is in a state of moral decay. We hope that we have recognized this in time and can leave with a clear conscience and minimal loss of confidence.
PS: We will keep our current advertisements on the jerseys and we will pay the liabilities to the clubs properly. We wanted to have our ads modified in protest (to help promote changes in Czech football). It has been said that if we do this, the club with such a modified jersey advertisement faces the risk of losing by default, for example, because it is damaging the good name of Czech football. We believe that we will agree with the clubs to cross out our advertisement for the rest of the season or replace it with text that will support the purification of Czech football. It is clear to all that the existing name of football cannot be damaged…
Associations and organisations that believe in change
Open letter to Czech football
Call us when you reinstall the football. Until then, pay for it yourself.
Dear Czech football,
Over time, we are not the only ones to observe frequent problems that lead to key failures in your system. If you were a program running on our servers, we would be getting warnings about corrupted files and it would only be a matter of time before you became completely unusable to your users due to many critical errors leading to a fatal system crash from which you would never recover.
Sure, you might get rebooted once in a while. They’ll try to restore some of those corrupted files, or maybe come up with an update that makes you more usable to the user just for show. But the warnings just keep coming. And they are becoming more and more urgent.
We are one of the most successful Czech IT companies. One fifth of the entire Czech Internet is directed to our servers. We have our own hard-won experience in solving difficult problems. We have always faced all challenges head on, both in the online and offline world. We know what you need and we want to help you because you are important to us too. We have already invested an eight-figure sum in supporting Czech sport, and the bulk of it in you, Czech football.
If you were on our servers in this state, what you would need is a complete reinstall. You need a new operating system that fits your users’ current requirements, is fast enough, scales well, and is open so everyone can see what you’re all about. Given the state you are in, we strongly recommend that you replace everyone who has been looking after you. Also consider modern and well-functioning open community entry trends. In the world of IT, there is nothing better than a passionate and motivated community that keeps a program always up-to-date, modern and resistant to all the pitfalls of the Internet. Such a solution is, in a way, a more advanced form of democracy.
Czech football, you’ve helped us grow. We’d like to continue to support you, but our advertising on footballers’ jerseys is starting to have a very bitter taste lately. We’re even beginning to feel that you’re hurting our brand…
We wouldn’t be where we are if we couldn’t stand up to resistance and make the big and, above all, the right decision. Maybe it’s time…
We are the general partner of FC Zbrojovka Brno and the main partner of SK Dynamo České Budějovice, and at the same time we are an IT company that has supported amateur athletes for several years, for example by giving away several hundred sets of jerseys. Now, after much deliberation, we have decided that we will not continue to financially support poorly functioning football in the Czech Republic under the current situation.
We entered big football last season. We were literally thrilled with the ad hit. This season we wanted to continue and we arranged partnerships with two first league clubs. We found football advertising to be even more effective than the online advertising we grew up on.
We didn’t ask the clubs for some amazing results. We always wanted to play nice and clean football. The players on the field have to give it their all and the fans have to be satisfied. Points are not everything. Beautiful football with proud fans, that was what we wanted. But even though the players were trying their best, sometimes we felt that there was something wrong…
In October, when certain individuals were raided, there is hope for all decent people. We believed that would change. For several months there was literally an atmosphere of fear. There were no jokes about corruption in football. No one knew whether or not he was in the wiretaps or if they were coming for him. All the time most of the officials were scared, the referees (surprisingly) didn’t get too involved. However, the last 3-4 rounds have produced some controversial decisions. Various interventions, “penalties” and “non-penalties” and VAR literally “bent” where it was needed. There’s a way to justify it… Abroad, they know how to cancel a wrongly imposed red card and in the Czech Republic it is “talked around” and defended. We see it all going back to the way it was and we don’t want to be there.
Football is not changing for the better. Rather the opposite. The cases are slowly dying down and the situation is returning to the previous practices. Judges get it badly wrong sometimes. I guess VAR doesn’t exactly see what the rest of the nation sees. Delegates are people who are connected (or even involved) with the old practices…
Most of the clubs are comfortable with the current situation and all of them look at it that if they want to function, they need to be part of the “octopus”. But it’s not an octopus anymore, it’s a pretty big cracker with tentacles ranging from clubs in the district championship, through district committees and regions to premier league clubs…
We can see that there’s not going to be any clean football here. We don’t believe it. There are several organisations that would like to achieve change. However, for such a big change they would have to sit down together, arrange cooperation and start a proper project based on the best of each of them.
A major intervention is needed throughout the football association. Top (headquarters), bottom (districts and clubs) and middle (regions). It is necessary to move from diplomatic talk and pseudo-distribution of posts to proper uncompromising action that no one will be able to challenge.
We’d like to be wrong, but we’re afraid that won’t happen…
What we can do, however, is to cut the football “cracker” off from our money. Ifwe will no longer support football financially. We’ll let the current contracts expire (we have one closed for the next season). We will honour our contracts and financial commitments to the clubs in full, even if there is eventually no advertising. We are now in negotiations with clubs to remove our advertising during this season or to cross it out. We are negotiating to replace our ads with some form of support for associations fighting for clean football. In accordance with our contracts, we want to enforce it a little bit, but the clubs have concerns, which of course we respect.
We believe that other companies from all over the Czech Republic supporting Czech football will join us. Companies, that want to real changes. We believe that we are not alone in asking ourselves whether we want to be associated with the current state and eventsi. For us, credibility is the absolute basis of our behaviour towards the public and towards our customers. They have their dates with us. They need to know that we are not “baking” anything with anyone and no one has any “leverage” over us.
The post-covid era will have a huge impact on all of football. Maybe a few professional clubs won’t survive economically. Amateur and children’s football will turn out even worse. We think it will be necessary to cancel some of the competitions because there will be no one to play them. He won’t even want to. People will realise that there is other entertainment than rigged football, which gives you no pleasure, but rather anger. Dads away from their families will, instead of playing the lower competitions, prefer to be with their children. Kids won’t play football because there are plenty of other ways to use their time. And a sport without spectators? Nobody likes that…
Needless to say, if there are not drastic changes in the whole Czech football quickly, the situation will only get worse and the bad guys will get a feeling of untouchability and the evil will take root much deeper than we all think.
If everyone is afraid to call things by their real names and everyone defends their positions, nothing will really change. Needless to say, new initiatives must come with real agendas and not just proclamations or considerations about who will have what posts.
We hereby call on other companies to consider further involvement in football until Czech football is cleaned up. We believe that there are like-minded people and companies who care about the recovery of Czech football.
If there are changes, we will be back and we will be happy to support Czech football again.
She says goodbye respectfully,
WEDOS
In Hluboká nad Vltavou on 23. February 2021