Snoop Dogg: Swansea’s new owner shows his pride with football Championship appearance

Swansea City co-owner Snoop Dogg before the Sky Bet Championship match at the Swansea.com Stadium. Photo / Getty Images

Swansea City v Preston North End on a Tuesday night. Unquestionably a Championship glamour clash for the ages, but not necessarily where you would expect to see a gangsta rap icon.

Nevertheless, there was Snoop Dogg in South Wales, for the unmissable meeting between the 15th and 10th-placed teams in the English football league’s second tier. This was arguably the biggest Welsh rap crossover since the chart-bothering days of Goldie Lookin Chain.

The Championship is in an oddly celebrity-heavy era, with the Wrexham feel-good story starring Ryan Reynolds, Rob McElhenney and an £18 million ($40.7m) grant from the public purse for stadium improvements.

Tom Brady is a minority investor at Birmingham City, JJ Watt looks likely to be back with Burnley next season, but strangely, Ipswich Town shirt sponsor Ed Sheeran seems rather less keen to visit Portman Road this season than he did last, during his team’s dalliance with the Premier League.

Snoop signed up for a piece of the Swansea pie last July, following Luka Modric’s arrival as a minority shareholder. Modric is still playing for AC Milan, so he is yet to visit the hallowed Swansea.com stadium in his new role. Snoop, though, arrived this week with the assertive apathy of a professional footballer, ignoring some well-wishers but posing with the ballboys.

Fans took the opportunity to pose next to a painting of Snoop, presumably more Instagram-friendly than any similar artwork featuring Lee Trundle.

The front of the programme was given over to a picture of this painting, which features Snoop midway through a tub of Joe’s, a beloved local ice cream parlour. A Snoop scoop?

You cannot fault the man’s stamina. Fresh from his Winter Olympics hypeman role, he was in the suburb of Llansamlet on Monday night performing Beautiful (feat. Pharrell Williams) sans Pharrell but plus a fetching patterned handkerchief.

Styling these as bandannas is historically a sign of allegiance to the wearer’s gang of choice, but any sinister associations are somewhat offset if you wrap it around your neck too, like a chilly grandmother.

Then an appeal to adopt a pre-match towel twirl, an idea popularised in the hip-hop hotbed of Pittsburgh in the 1970s.

Presumably a nice free gift, but what’s wrong with a good old-fashioned polyester scarf?

The generosity did not stop there, with Snoop buying tickets in bulk to donate to local community groups. If you can overlook several legal issues and visits to prison, it is hard not to warm to him. He clearly understands how to charm an audience: witness him gamely taking a tour of Swansea’s training ground and trying his hand at shirt-printing, dropping the machine like it’s hot.

Then the moment we had all been waiting for, a crowd of fans twirling towels as instructed while Snoop and his entourage walked around the pitch, geeing up his public.

This sort of thing never used to happen at the Vetch Field.

Swansea could not harness Snoop’s power for a decent first-half performance. Preston took the lead and the travelling fans sang “Snoop Dogg, what’s the score?”. It stayed 1-0 until second-half injury time, when Liam Cullen snatched a late equaliser.

Unfortunately, at some point in the second half, Snoop had seen enough, so missed it. Oh well, at least he beat the notoriously Los Angeles-like traffic of Swansea.