Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. This is club 73/92. The best way to follow his journey and read all of the previous pieces is by subscribing here
Get it wrong and you will turn your own fan base against you. Have it changed by new owners and supporters will understandably lose their minds. But an increasing number of football clubs, from elite level down, are choosing to change their club crests.
Some, like Newcastle United and Leeds United, have gone back to a previous retro design. Juventus went for a very different, modern design. Aston Villa, controversially, changed their crest and then changed it again when it didn’t have the desired effect. The point is this: changing the crest, which may once have been a PR no-no, is happening more often.
This summer, Cambridge United are doing exactly that. So I went to speak to the club, and the crest designer, to explain in six parts a process that requires great care and judgement…
The reasoning
Football clubs are not just football clubs any more, at least not when it comes to revenue generation. You need more money to stand still, in any league, and thus must look to alternative revenue streams to make it. One of the principal – and easiest to pull off – methods is fashion retail.
Rather than simply producing home and away kits, you create clothing ranges. At elite clubs, that becomes a lifestyle brand (Paris Saint-Germain have probably been the most successful at this). In the EFL, those clothing ranges make precious money.
That clothing is easier and cheaper to produce (and thus your profit margin increases) with minimalist designs and that includes the club crest. A detailed crest that is difficult to replicate or mass reproduce is your kryptonite, not only on merchandising but on all digital platforms. That is the driving factor.
“The main driver was modernisation,” Cambridge chief executive Alex Tunbridge says. “The current crest was adopted in 1984 and it is very clipart-y.
“It is something that you might see on the shirt of a US grassroots soccer team. It was created before the internet, before the age of social media and before advancements in technology in retail. All of those things mean that the crest is not conducive to digital and retail.
“I think that we have done really well recently with our kit culture. We have got a bit of a niche there and our retail team have done a superb job in creating some really interesting designs, various collaborations, linking with the city. We have seen how we can move the dial on a couple of items. To try and help the whole thing, and bring it all together, was really exciting.”
For Cambridge United, there was another driver. Although the football club was founded in 1912 and the city is world-renowned as a place of learning with over seven million tourists annually, the club and city – at least in the mind of an outsider like me – feel quite separate. The club’s owners (who are Cambridge supporters) wanted to address that. This was a chance to create a brand that showcased the club, not to rebrand the club. There is a difference.
“We are engaging with our current fanbase, but we also have aspirations of increasing our fanbase,” Tunbridge says.
“We are in the process of looking at a redevelopment of the stadium to move to a 12,000 capacity.
“At the moment we are averaging just under 7,000, so if we want to fill the stadium we obviously need more people through the door. Cambridge is a big place and this is a two-county club, so maybe we are missing a trick. Maybe it is a slight barrier.”
The heritage
Football supporters are, appropriately and understandably, keen for the traditions of their football clubs to be upheld. As football slow-danced with late-stage capitalism for 20 years, a period that seemingly caused everything to change for better or worse, the framework of their clubs – name, kit colour, nickname – became sacrosanct.
Badges don’t quite fall into the same category, not least because they have tended to shift over the course of a club’s history. But it’s still a cause of some contention, depending upon the methodology. You don’t get to just swan in and do what you want.
As part of the fan-led review into football’s governance in 2021, that led to the intended introduction of an independent regulator, the Football Association proactively moved to change the rules around the changing of club crests. Its guidance now says that owners or decision-makers must embark upon an extensive consultation process. This is good practice anyway; the FA wanted to formalise it.
As Tunbridge says, Cambridge United’s current crest was created in 1984. It consists of a large generic football with “CU” in orange lettering. The words “Cambridge United” are written below the crest, but in very small lettering that Tunbridge says presents a problem. They are mighty difficult to make out on a small badge, but leave them off and outsiders may not recognise the crest as distinctly Cambridge United.
At the top of the crest is the top of a turret. Many people understandably mistake that for part of a castle. In fact, it represents the turrets of the city’s famous Magdalene Bridge.
Cambridge United 1-2 Wigan Athletic
- Game no.: 41/92
- Miles: 166
- Cumulative miles: 6,775
- Total goals seen: 96
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: Home supporters mistakenly leaving the ground at the end of the 90 minutes because they didn’t realise that the FA Cup has scrapped replays. Gutted.
One of the issues clubs face is the timing of these projects. After four years in League One, Cambridge United are likely to be relegated back to League Two this season. It is far easier to implement changes when on-pitch performance is high, and far harder to persuade supporters that the work is important when performance is low.
“We have had criticism from people saying it has been a waste of money, that we should have put that money into the squad,” Tunbridge says. “It is a very, very small sum, if I am honest. I think we have already covered the costs already in things that have come off the back of it.
“It is difficult sometimes to separate the emotions of what goes on the pitch versus what takes place off the pitch is finding a balance. And in any club really, I think that the individuals working on projects such as this, their skillset is in this area. It is not in scouting players, signing players and picking football teams. So it’s how the two coexist really.
“We are going to go and launch this real exciting new identity and everything, and we are going to be in League Two when you naturally want to be competing at the highest division possible. But should we have shelved the project just because we thought we were going to get relegated? You would never go forwards.”
The consultation
For Cambridge United, this has been a long process roughly split into two periods. They started with a survey of supporters, from which they learned that one third were against the idea of a change and two-thirds were either open to or supportive of that change. You are never going to get a complete positive consensus in this area – that is human nature.
Cambridge United then worked with a design agency and put out a design to their supporters in September 2023. It retained the Magdalene Bridge turret, included a ball and book (more on that later) and minimised and modernised the club initials.
“I think, in our hearts of hearts, we knew that it probably wasn’t quite right but we saw value in putting it out there and seeing what happened,” Tunbridge says.
“It was never ‘This is it, this is going to be on the shirts next year’. It was just offering something and waiting for impact.
“The initial reaction was quite negative, more than we thought. But interestingly, we took data at the beginning and the end of a period and opinions and feelings moved over that time period. We learned that you need to give people a chance to live with designs, rather than gauging a mood on day one.”
The club made the difficult decision to accept that they had not got it right, step back from the project and take a few months away from it. They opted for a football-specific designer and, rather than produce one design, created three options. Then began a period of extended consultation.
“We created three designs but never asked for a definitive vote on which one people wanted,” Tunbridge says. “Initially it was just to get feedback on all of them. We ran a six-week consultation process where we worked with all stakeholders in the club. We ran in-person events, we had supermarket-style token drops to pick a favourite. We created mock-ups of the designs on shirts and merchandise so it wasn’t just a PDF image on a screen.
“We saw that people’s views on things shifted over that period. By taking them on that journey, by using dozens of different data points, we found a clear direction of travel and a clear embracing of the designs, particularly from younger supporters. They are the future of this club.
“This has been 18 months in the making. There have been hundreds of hours of conversations and research. We know that we could have rushed it, but we wouldn’t have got to where we wanted to get to. There have been times when we wondered if we would ever get here. I would say that it is one of the hardest things I have done.”
The designer
Chris Payne had been a football crest designer for some time, largely working in the US and then with English non-league clubs: York City, Yeovil Town, Eastleigh. When he spoke with Cambridge United, Chris had not done a Football League club crest before.
Payne immersed himself in the club. He went to games, spent time in the city, took photos of the architecture, met with supporters and generally tried to understand the unique identifiers that made the club tick. One issue with Cambridge is that there was no existing crest identifier, say a cockerel or a robin. It is usually easier to work around one idea than eight.
“My starting point, after speaking to Cambridge United, was to fully engage with everything around the club and city,” Payne says.
“This was the best client I’ve worked with because they gave me the time and trust to do that, and it really makes a difference. They also repeatedly emphasised the point that they wanted to take supporters on the journey with them.”
“I needed to live the life of a Cambridge United fan. That means repeatedly experience the full matchday – pints before, in the stands, pints after. But it also means being in the city 90 per cent of the time to speak to people about what matters to them outside the matchday experience.”
The result
The results of the consultation were fairly clear. Cambridge United’s stakeholders almost all selected the “evolution” design as their favourite. That design, as the name suggests, was not a dramatic departure. The club’s initials are contained within a ball shape, although the details of the football have been removed. The Magdalene Bridge detail is still the predominant design feature.
But Cambridge also brought the three designs to the attention of supporters deliberately. Because they saw value in people living with the designs for a while and getting used to them, the other two designs will still exist as sub-identities to the primary crest. One of these focuses upon an abbey window in a nod to the club’s origins and stadium name. The other has a book and ball at the centre, referring to Cambridge’s role in the creation of association football’s rule.
“The sub-identity strategy is actually a fairly new initiative that has come over from the US,” Payne says.
“It allows for greater freedom. In the case of the primary design, there is typically less demand for anything quirky or significantly different.
“But by bringing in additional secondary designs, you create an opportunity to be more courageous and perhaps even quirky without alienating those who understandably feel a connection to the crest as is.”
This plays a role in the development of the brand, because these sub-identities become familiar to supporters over time and become included in the general stable of the club’s identity. As well as the launch of the new crest this summer, including new replica shirts, there will be a retail range with the nook and ball design. The hope is that, by picking out several aspects of your identity, you create wider brand awareness.
The impact
I am happy to admit that I am one of those cynics who says “It’s just a badge”. I am a traditionalist who already loves a football club and thus would not be swayed by any other club producing a new crest that I thought was cool.
But I am also not the audience here. Cambridge United want a new generation of younger supporters, from the local area and beyond. They want to generate more revenue from merchandising and retail to fund on-pitch performance. If this was all marketing bluster that meant nothing, the biggest clubs in the world would not be doing exactly the same.
“At the moment it only exists digitally,” Tunbridge says. “So we are really excited to see it come to life and land. I don’t think it will be until August until everyone appreciates the change. Hopefully that will be when people appreciate that we have got this right.
“Doing it like this has got a far better reaction than we thought that we would have. I reckon a dozen other clubs have called up to say that they like what we have done and I know that Chris is speaking to multiple clubs.
“It has also opened up some interesting doors for us. We’ve commissioned an initial three-part documentary with CBS for next season. We have some really interesting front-of-shirt conversations going on. We have signed one of the biggest deals outside top-flight football with Umbro for merchandise and we’ve got a retail range on par with some Premier League clubs that will launch in the summer.”
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/JkO0oZl
Post a Comment
EmoticonClick to see the code!
To insert emoticon you must added at least one space before the code.