Scott Barlow is not happy. The chairman of Sydney FC has formally protested to the heads of Australian football. There are rumours he’ll camp outside their offices until justice is done. The problem? Melbourne Heart were bought by the owners of Manchester City. There is a proposal that they will become Melbourne City. The owners want their clubs to match. Manchester City wear sky blue. So do Sydney FC.

"Sky blue is much more than just a colour for Sydney FC, it's central to our identity,” Barlow said. "We're extremely concerned about the proposed use of sky blue by Melbourne Heart, and we've made our concerns very clear to the FFA.”

Scott. Friend. Perhaps the relentlessly beautiful weather in your town has brought on a state of lotus-eating confusion. Perhaps it’s the stress of helming such a prestige club. This is Sydney FC, after all, a name spoken reverently in every corner of the Asian Football Confederation. In the pre-dawn dark on the Mongolian steppes, a young boy pulls on his Terry McFlynn shirt before knocking the morning ice from his yurt. Coffee shops in Tashkent thrill to animated retellings of Richard Garcia’s sealer against the despised Perth Glory. With great power comes great responsibility, and responsibility weighs heavy. In a way, Scott, you are Phar Lap, dragging 10 stone around Flemington in the Melbourne Cup, and none of us want you to die in Mexico in suspicious circumstances during the 1930s.

“Sydney Football Club.” Elegant in its simplicity, it tells you everything you need to know. They play football. They are from Sydney. But we must concede, even a global powerhouse cannot claim ownership of a hue. It is hard to trademark a point on the visible spectrum at which light of a highly specific wavelength is scattered more liberally than its fellows.

“Sky blue represents our club, our harbour city and is the traditional colour of New South Wales,” said Barlow, forgetting, as people from Sydney are inclined to do, that Sydney and New South Wales are not in fact the same thing. Sky blue also represents Uruguay. It represents Napoli. It represents Ballymena FC, Celta Vigo, Sporting Cristal. It has represented Man City for 120 years. Two hours south you’ll find Coventry’s Sky Blues, yet there’s little evidence the 1940 levelling of the city was a Mancunian revenge de palette.

The world offers only so many shades and pairings. The traditional colour of NSW may be worn by the Waratahs, but also their Super Rugby rivals from Auckland. No one seems to mind. Donning darker shades are Les Bleus, Gli Azzurri, Los Albiazules, the Blue Samurai, Chelsea, Birmingham City, Everton, Shrewsbury, Grays Athletic, Linfield, Stranraer. Generally we can tell them apart.

"In football, club colours are sacred,” was Barlow’s contention. You need think only of Manchester United, in their incarnation as Newton Heath, and their sacred green and gold, the kit that gave way to consecrated halves of red and white, then to holy wattle stripes, to the virginal purity of the all-white strip, to the hallowed straight red, the venerated V on white, and the blessedly weird hooped maroon job that clearly came at a hard time in the livery merchant’s life. Coventry went through nine colour schemes before their own sky blue, including variants that had them looking like especially hideous jockeys, and a fancy black number out of an S&M dungeon.

Torquay United have used the current colours of City, West Ham and Newcastle. The Twenty20 World Cup saw Australia dressed as New Zealand; South Africa as Australia; England as the Dutch and Bangladesh as a 1990s tropical-themed restaurant chain. Liverpool first played in – guess what? Sky blue.

Colours change. When they do, angst abounds. Our loyalty is to concepts, but we extend it to symbols that represent them. Note the battlefield obsession with taking and defending flags: impractical, compared to defending the gunpowder or the hill or Belgium, but flags gave one side hope and the other pause. Team colours are like that: when you see yours stream onto the field you feel a thrill of hope, of recognition, of belonging. It can be a conduit for nostalgia, a link to childhood, family and friends. We want our team to be a point of constancy in an uncertain world, and we are greatly discomfited when it proves to be fluid like everything else.

In the end, raising a shirt to the level of sanctity makes as much sense as worshipping a golden calf or asking a fountain to make your dreams come true. The uniforms tell one team from another; all meaning is projected. You arrive at training, grab a red bib or green. The bell rings at lunchtime, you play shirts or skins. Thusly distinguished one from the other, you strive for the side you’re assigned. Play a while with the same side and loyalty builds. You know who you are, the rest is wrapping.

You can see it with Cardiff City: as vocally as fans have protested the change from blue to red, they remain fans and it remains their club. In time the shirt will either change back or be accepted. Fitzroy AFL fans were dislocated when their side merged with Brisbane, but many eventually reconciled themselves to the amalgam. Port Adelaide’s promotion to national level saw Collingwood pull a Sydney FC, refusing to share black and white stripes. I’m not suggesting that silver and teal were a good result, but 20 years on people are used to it.

Of course losing historical colours would be tough. It’s a stretch, though, for Sydney’s chairman to try evoking a Cardiff level of trauma on behalf of Heart. "Melbourne Heart fans understand and value the history as to why the club wears red and white,” he said, “and understandably they would want to protest that." With respect to Melbourne Heart, the club has been around five years. I own socks with more history.

Heart will be fine: colours often shift in a club’s early life. Sydney, though, are not even suffering that spurious injustice. They’re mad about sharing. They’re worried about two teams having blue shirts, despite different shorts, socks, design, trim, fill-in graphics, sponsor logos, and an away strip for when they play each other. It makes me wonder if Barlow used the pseudonym "The Cat" to leave this comment on The Roar:

I’m sick and tired of turning up to watch St George and finding myself at a Swans game. Same thing happened last year when I was in Italy and went to catch Collingwood. You couldn’t imagine how pissed off I was when some soccer team came out and Pendlebury didn’t even play, just some Pirlo guy who wouldn’t even make the VFL. We should be inventing new colours, not using old ones.

If that was you, Scott, please don’t worry. You’ll be OK. There will be plenty to distinguish Sydney FC. Forthright leadership, community engagement, and a compelling presence on the pitch would all be helpful for a football club wanting recognition and respect. You don’t want to let the throng in Tashkent down. Colours cannot be owned or tamed, and that’s a happy thought. If you do start to feel tension in your head, an irrational rage brewing against some old team from somewhere or a new one somewhere else, just go outside next time the sun comes out and look up to Sydney’s autumn sky. It’s beautiful, it’s blue, and it’s big enough to share with everyone.