The Last Defender: Club rebrands

Matt Stead

Forks, knives, dessert spoons, serving spoons and soup spoons together, and teaspoons on the horizontal at the bottom; that’s how a cutlery drawer is supposed to go. But for the last seven years I’ve been living with a maniacal despot who insists it’s: knives, dessert spoons, forks, teaspoons. Can you imagine? The only thing getting me through is the thought that when she’s dead I can put it right and it’ll feel amazing. It’s important to have things to look forward to in life.

I think my distaste is how most people feel when an institution they love – like, say, a football club – decides to change their look. This Sunday we’ll see the Relatively Recent Unpopular Rebrand Derby, as Sky Sports insist on calling it, when Everton host West Ham United.

Three years ago, Everton removed two wreaths and the words ‘Nil Satis Nisi Optimum’ from their badge. This was met with such strong resistance from the fans that they backtracked before they even started using it – perhaps making Evertonians the only fans in the world who get angry when the word ‘nil’ isn’t alongside their name. In West Ham’s case, the crime is the addition of the word ‘London’ to their new badge, drawing mockery from other fans and disgruntlement from Hammers fans.

‘People are resistant to change’ is hardly breaking news, but football fans are a particularly stubborn lot. For both those redesigns, you could see the response tweets coming from a mile away:

“Why have they paid a marketing agency £200,000 for that?” (Because graphic design isn’t just scribbling down the first thing you think of and bad design looks truly terrible, so good designers can charge a premium.)

“Lol it looks like the generic badge they’d use for Trad Brick United in Pro Evo.” (Oh you wag!)

“It’s everything that’s wrong with modern football.”

“It’s an affront to the traditions of the club.”

The latter two are the most fervent objections, and while I don’t want to be that “people hated the Eiffel Tower at first” guy, I absolutely do want to be that “people hated the Eiffel Tower at first” guy.

Every tradition has to start and end somewhere. I can only imagine what Twitter would have looked like when Leeds ditched their iconic blue-and-yellow home kit in 1960 to mimic Real Madrid, when Coventry reverted to sky blue for the first time in half a century in 1962, when Liverpool started wearing all red in 1965, or when Crystal Palace moved away from claret and blue to imitate Barcelona in 1973. Many people reading this are old enough to remember that Bournemouth only permanently added black stripes in 1990. It’s now impossible to imagine those clubs wearing anything else: the rebrands have become iconic.

Fittingly, resistance to change is, in itself, nothing new, as a Leyton Orient fan recounts: “In 1968, my dad took me to see the first home game of the season. As the Reds ran out, Tijuana Taxi sounded over the Tannoy. My dad laughed. ‘What’s this got to do with Orient or even football? I can’t see them keeping this for long’.” 48 years later, Orient fans would be up in arms if Tijuana Taxi were taken away.

It’s a question of intent: my wife’s deviant approach to cutlery ordering is one thing, but I’d be rightly upset if an intruder came into my home and rearranged all the knives and forks (Cardiff, Hull). But as long as that bizarre invader doesn’t also trash the place (Charlton, Blackpool, Coventry), it’s ultimately only a minor and temporary annoyance. Your club might change its badge or its kit or even its name, but it’s still fundamentally the same club you fell in love with.

Even the cutlery drawer I grew up with isn’t the same order anymore, but I can think of no greater illustration that when a substantial redesign is done with love, it can be a thing of beauty:

 

Steven Chicken