What is a badge in any case? It’s a complicated question to answer.
Perhaps your football club’s most ubiquitous symbol is a storied, heraldic design harking back to the local coat of arms or a sleek, modern design dreamt up to look effortlessly slick emblazoned on modern sportswear.
But why is there a tree? Or a bee? Or a devil? Is that an elephant? SQUIRRELS!
This week, The Athletic is breaking down the details hiding in plain sight and explaining what makes your club’s badge.
Manchester City’s badge is pretty new by football standards. The crest was redesigned in 2015 and the result is synonymous with an unprecedented era of success for the club.
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City relaunched their official website and unveiled Pep Guardiola as their new manager before the 2016-17 season, tying together strands of the club’s identity that have modernised their brand around the world.
This is the fourth badge in City’s history.
The previous one was only introduced in 1997 and was pretty unique, featuring an eagle, which had briefly appeared on Manchester’s coat of arms to represent the city’s booming aerospace industry. Some City fans playfully refer to it as a parrot.
The badge Manchester City wore from 1997 until 2015 (Photo: Chris Brunskill Ltd/Corbis via Getty Images)The three stars were purely decorative rather than indicating the times the club won titles or other major trophies.
The current badge reverted to the round design that had been part of previous crests since 1960, and in that sense harks back to the club’s previous golden period in the late ’60s and early 1970s.
The new badge retains an image of a ship, an element that has featured on every badge since the club changed their name from Ardwick AFC to Manchester City in 1894 and represents the Manchester ship canal, a key artery for the industrial revolution that transformed the city.
The three stripes represent the three rivers that run through Manchester — the Irwell, Irk and Medlock. This element featured on the previous badge and all of the others between 1894 and 1972.
The current crest also retains the red rose of Lancashire, which was introduced to the badge in 1972 and featured until the eagle design’s launch in the mid-1990s. That one skirts around some local politics of just what is Lancashire and what is Manchester or Greater Manchester, but that’s for another day.
One original feature was the addition of ‘1894’, the year the club became Manchester City.
Previous badges had included ‘F.C.’ on them, but City did away with the ‘football club’ formalities for the new effort, and the dark blue lettering on sky blue and white background does make the club’s name a prominent feature, certainly compared to the eagle design, in which our feathered friend, which somewhat dwarfed the ‘M.C.F.C’ lettering.
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The club motto ‘Superbia in Proelio’, which means ‘Pride in Battle’ and was introduced in 1997, was also removed.
The return to the circular badge ties in with the designs used by sister clubs New York City and Melbourne City, and other teams around the world added to the City Football Group since then have also adopted round crests.
Manchester City unveil their current badge in 2015 (Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP)Consultation with supporters took place over a month and the process was hailed at the time by Manchester historian Dr Gary James.
“I am most pleased that what has emerged is a badge that can be described as a modern original — a badge that is authentic to the club and to the city but with future-facing touches,” Dr James said.
“It respects and echoes badges that have come before it, but is not a pastiche of them. I am also thrilled that, for the first time, the club’s birthdate is featured. What a perfect statement about how long this club has been around and how far it has come.”
Enthusiasm around the relaunched badge was somewhat dampened at the time after the design emerged on the website of Britain’s Intellectual Property office several days before it was supposed to be made public just after Christmas 2015.
The fact the changes flew under the radar to some extent, and don’t feel particularly new when looking back now, is an indication of how well the updated version was received.
Compared to Leeds’ proposed logo redesign in 2018, which was swiftly ditched due to fierce backlash from supporters and amid mockery from further afield, or even the Juventus badge, which appeared in 2017 but was far from universally popular, City can feel pretty happy with their current badge — one that surely won’t need changing for a good while yet.
(Top image designed by Samuel Richardson)
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