The perils of changing club crests

The Liverpool Football Club late last month revealed a new jersey - and a new crest - for next season, when it will commemorate its 125th anniversary. The new design, which closely resembles the current one, was greeted with what amounted to benign acceptance from the team’s fans. Given the alternative, that was probably a good thing.
 
In soccer, altering or even the suggestion of altering, heritage-filled insignia is a perilous task. Changing iconic, and often beloved, emblems that are emblazoned on clothes and mugs, painted on city walls and even tattooed on bodies has become an almost certain way to cause rifts among fans and provoke outrage on social media, where criticism can be registered and amplified exponentially in an instant.

 
Across Stanley Park in Liverpool, for example, Liverpool FC’s neighbour, Everton, angered fans in 2013 when the club streamlined its logo and, in the process, removed a banner with its Latin motto, Nil Satis Nisi Optimum, or “Nothing but the best is good enough.” Despite Everton’s declaration that an in-house consultation that included fans had taken place, an online petition opposing the crest quickly collected the signatures of more than 6,000 aggrieved supporters.
 

Too late to remove the unpopular logo for the coming season, Everton issued an apology, held meetings with fans, took surveys and, ultimately, held a vote on three potential alternatives. The Latin motto returned to the crest a year later, where it remains today.

 
For those recently tasked with reshaping Liverpool’s famous jersey crest and club badge, there were plenty of historic — and revered — elements to be considered: the liver bird, a mythical creature symbolic of the city; an image of twin flames, an early 1990s addition that pays tribute to the victims of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster that left 96 trampled or crushed to death at a Football Association Challenge cup game at Sheffield; and the Shankly Gates, a homage to Bill Shankly, widely considered the team’s greatest manager, on which are stamped the words to the club’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Tampering with any of them, as at least one sponsor has done recently, can lead to a public relations disaster.

 
In the end, the new Liverpool design featured few changes: the team’s jerseys will continue to feature a golden liver bird with “125 Years” beneath it and the dates 1892 and 2017 on either side. The badge itself will not be altered, except to add type denoting the years and the 125th anniversary.
 
But Latin mottos and eternal flames are only two of the often decades-old elements that designers must consider in any rebranding. Many European clubs started out as just that, and so the features that adorned their crests — coats of arms and animals, weapons and tools, local landmarks and significant dates — often had little to do with concepts like revenue generation and marketing appeal.

 
Wholesale changes are rarely popular. When the Malaysian businessman Vincent Tan took over Cardiff City in 2010, he pledged to invest tens of millions of dollars if the Bluebirds switched their primary color to red, Tan’s lucky color and one that might increase business opportunities in Asia, where it has symbolic value. The alterations went ahead in 2012, only for the team to revert to blue three years later after public protests.
 
In January, the Italian team Juventus raised eyebrows when it revealed a minimalist logo that the club said it hoped would extend beyond soccer and into a lifestyle brand. Design professionals loved it. Fans? Not so much.

 
A similar approach did not work for London’s Queens Park Rangers, whose previous owners were perceived to have fumbled a rebrand ahead of the 2008 season.
 
“They didn’t really understand the club and were trying to stamp their own feel on it,” said Daniel Norris, a graphic designer and QPR fan. He declared the first effort “a bit of a mess,” even to an amateur eye. After the current chairman, Tony Fernandes, took over QPR in 2011, Norris and a fellow designer, Daniel Bowyer, used social media as a means of engaging fans to achieve the change they desired. They put out suggestions for possible new crests, worked closely with the club’s in-house designers, and pushed for a professional typographer to be hired, Norris said. A modernized version of the previous logo was released ahead of the current season.

 
That more transparent approach, Norris said, can lead to a positive outcome. It has allowed fans to understand Real Madrid’s decision to remove the Christian cross from its logo on clothing sold in the Middle East, and it eased the recent introduction of redrawn logos for the teams at Manchester City and West Ham.
 
© 2017 The New York Times