LONDON — When the soccer players stride out on to the pitch Saturday to start the new season of England’s elite Premier League, most of them will be wearing shirts emblazoned with contemporary versions of the coats of arms that date back to medieval battles when they were often the only way of telling which side an armor-clad soldier was on.
Sadly, none of the 20 club crests score highly in terms of design purity or aesthetics. Garish colors and clumsy detailing are rife. Yet the most imaginative of them are intriguing examples of vernacular design, whose choice of symbolism is expressive, often eccentric and tells us a great deal about the character of the club, its history and location.
Like so many other aspects of modern soccer, the current Premier League emblems are the products of commercialism. For decades, most English clubs adopted the civic insignia of their towns or cities. But as the global market for soccer merchandise and media rights expanded, many clubs replaced them with distinctive symbols that would be instantly recognizable and therefore more lucrative.
Even so, every club bar one has emerged with a crest that looks very similar to a traditional coat of arms. The odd one out is Swansea City, which sports the closest the Premiership comes to a modernist logo, albeit a cheesily styled one consisting of a swan with wings resembling sea (duh!) waves. And even Swansea has chosen a heraldic-style emblem for this season to mark its centenary.
All of the others have plumped for armorial motifs, typically in the shape of shields packed with illustrative symbols. There are three exceptions. Fulham’s shield encases its initials, FFC, and Stoke City’s contains the red and white stripes on the player’s shirts, “1863,” the year the club was founded, and its nickname, the Potters. (Stoke is the heart of Britain’s pottery industry.) Tottenham Hotspur has forsaken a shield but stuck to antiquated symbolism with a cockerel wearing riding spurs and standing on a soccer ball. The club was reputedly named after a 14th-century knight, Henry Percy, known as Harry Hotspur for his feisty temperament and habit of attaching riding spurs to the legs of fighting cocks. Percy’s family owned much of the area of north London where the club is based.
Lots of other crests reflect the club’s geography. Local landmarks appear on Everton and Reading’s motifs, while Manchester City’s features a ship as a nod to the Manchester Ship Canal, a diagonal stripe for each of the city’s three rivers and one of its heraldic motifs, a golden eagle. Wigan Athletic has also opted for a civic symbol in a “Wiggin Tree,” the local name for a mountain ash tree; as has Chelsea with a lion like that on the coats of arms of both the now defunct borough of Chelsea and the family of a past club president and local landowner, Earl Cadogan.
One of the most eloquent geographical crests is Newcastle United’s cartoonish version of the city’s coat of arms. A shield in the club’s signature black and white stripes is flanked by a pair of sea horses, alluding to Newcastle’s seafaring history, and topped by the 12th-century castle that inspired its name and a golden lion carrying the civic flag. Another belongs to Sunderland, whose emblem features its signature red and white stripes with images of nearby Wearmouth Bridge, a local 19th-century folly and a colliery wheel in a nod to the region’s coal mines. Its shield is held up by two black lions, like those on the city’s insignia.
Other clubs draw on their histories. The canon on Arsenal’s crest is a nod to its nickname, the Gunners, a reference to the club’s original players, who worked at the Royal Arsenal armaments plant in Woolwich. Similarly, the rivet hammers on West Ham’s badge refer both to its name, the Hammers, and its origins at the Thames Ironworks. A Scottish lion is emblazoned on the emblem of Birmingham-based Aston Villa in honor of William McGregor, a Scottish draper who became involved with the club after moving to the area, then helped to found the English Football League in the 1880s. A white star shines beside the lion to mark Villa’s greatest triumph: winning the 1982 European Cup.
Both Norwich City and Queens Park Rangers allude to their nicknames in their logos: Canaries for the former and white Hoops for the latter. Similarly, West Bromwich Albion is known as Throstles, local slang for the thrushes that congregate at its stadium, The Hawthorns. The club’s crest depicts a throstle on a sprig of hawthorn.
A perky red devil dominates the emblem of my favorite club, Manchester United. Originally the nickname of the nearby Salford City Reds rugby club, the Red Devils was adopted by United in the mid-1960s at the behest of its manager, Matt Busby, who saw it as a tactical ploy to intimidate rival teams. The crest also features a ship for the Manchester Ship Canal and a couple of soccer balls.
The most poignant of the club motifs is Liverpool’s. A Liver Bird, the city’s symbol, is flanked by two flames to commemorate the 96 Liverpool fans who were crushed to death in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. The tops of the wrought iron Shankly Gates at Anfield, the club’s stadium, are replicated above the shield, including the title of Liverpool’s anthem, “You’ll never walk alone.”
Loyalty to Manchester United notwithstanding, my favorite premiership emblem is Southampton’s. Based on the winning entry of a 1970s competition in which the club’s supporters were invited to design a new crest, it combines a tree to symbolize the nearby New Forest, water for Southampton’s docks and its civic symbol, a white rose. A red-and-white-striped scarf flies above the crest with a soccer ball encircled by a golden halo in a nod to the club’s nickname, the Saints, which dates back to 1885, when it was founded as the St. Mary’s Church of England Young Men’s Association.
