Earlier this week, Tottenham announced that their logo will be changing for the first time in eighteen years. The “same Cockerel, remastered brand identity” announced by the club’s Instagram seemed like a rather grandiose statement in comparison to the actual changes made. Unlike in 2006, when the logo removed the two red lions and the “audere est facere” banner (all of which were drawn from the club’s 1983-4 logo), this new brand identity only involved the removal of the “Tottenham Hotspur” from below the logo. The change is minor, not least because it will not affect the club kits, which are already without this feature. Yet the focus on novelty and sleek design (which extends to almost every big business today, sporting or otherwise) points to an important shift in the aesthetics of football: that modern simplicity is in, and kitsch and clutter is out.
It is not just the Spurs logo which reflects this shift; the rejection of anything too gaudy or complicated is typified by Juventus, who have gone from an almost art nouveau-looking badge in 1905 to a logo which can be drawn in two pencil strokes. The charging bull featured on previous logos was, in the 1929-31 logo, a zebra, matching perfectly with the iconic black and white stripes, whilst Chelsea – now represented by the blue lion – used to have a bearded man in a marching band hat on their crest. Of course, as football has morphed into the immense money making project that it is today, brand imagery serves an increasingly different function. The club logo does not simply serve to embody its club and its fans, but to appear professional, not too complicated to the eye, and to be easily replicated. The message this sends to fans, however, is that they are no longer the club’s main focus; understanding a fanbase’s identity appears secondary to understanding market needs. The solution to this dissonance between football as business and football as culture is not a straightforward one; it may well be that big-business football and local identity are incompatible, and that any attempt to marry the two will ring hollow.
The issue with the simplification of logos is not modernity but superficiality. I am not arguing that clubs should arbitrarily rake up their past and retrieve features from their original kits and crest to seem more connected to their fans. The solution, I suggest, is neither recycling past club imagery nor doing away with it; club logo design, above all, should prioritise identity – an identity that should be ascertained through communication with the club’s fanbase. And I am sure that if Tottenham Hotspur went around asking fans what changes they wanted to see in their club, they probably wouldn’t put a sleek new logo on top of their priority list.
“File:Juventus Logo.png” by Design Week is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.