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The Football League’s rebrand to stabilize the lower leagues’ image

By on November 12, 2015

It takes but a quick walk across central London, eight minutes by the count of Google Maps, to tell the story of the Football Association and Football League’s foundation.  The day was April 28th of this year and the final panel of the 2015 Sporting Analytics Conference had just convened at 5:30, near Holborn.  At the same time, people were streaming out of The Freemasons’ Tavern in the adjoining building, leaving the streets packed with men in tails.  Walking down the street to find a suitable pub for supper proved very difficult, as these men dispersed across the row of restaurants lining the opposite street.

What do I remember from those moments? Cigar smoke and very crowded streets, but one small plaque somehow caught my eye on the wall of the Freemasons’ Tavern.  It’s circular and no larger than two feet in diameter, but marks a tremendously important moment in the history of football — the first meeting of The Football Association on October 26th, 1863.  It included representatives from all the founding clubs of the league, as well as schools from across England.  At that time, the rules of the game were up in the air, debates ranging as wildly, from whether to allow players to run with the ball in their hands to if hacking at an opponents shins to dispossess him should be legal.

Over the ensuing two months, the representatives met five more times before the FA’s inaugural match just a week before Christmas of 1963, near Chelsea.  At the time, football was still an amateur sport and all matches were facilitated between the teams themselves.

If you head due South of the Freemasons’ Tavern for a few blocks on the A4200, hopping from the Camden Borough to the Westminster Borough in the process, then head East towards Fleet Street and into London City, you’ll find yourself passing the old Anderton’s Hotel within a three quarters of a mile.  It was here, some twenty-two years later on March 23rd, 1888, where The FA met for their next monumental meeting.  For some time, Amateur clubs had been illegally bribing the best players for their services and that was the topic of debate that day in London.

The FA’s solution was to make football professional.  In early April, they convened in Manchester (another plaque commemorates this site) to found The Football League, which consisted of twelve teams and played its inaugural season the following year.  The league soon became so popular that the Second Division was created in 1892 and relegation and promotion with the old First Division, was introduced in 1898.

Today, the Football League released its latest rebrand to herald a new era of lower-league football in England.

But their original branding and logos last for quite a long time, through a brief break for World War I and into another period of rapid growth in the sport in the early 1920s.  In 1921, football was in so much demand that two regionalized Third Divisions were created and it wasn’t until after World War II in 1958 that they split to become the new Third and Fourth Divisions.

Aside from the change to a strictly white ball, though, the league’s branding remained unchanged for another thirty years as the Football League Pyramid was built below it.  However, in 1988, the league rebranded itself with a new logo to catch up with the changing times. The FA had altered its logo for the first and only time in 1948 (bar a commemorative gold logo in 2013, celebrating the FA’s one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday), removing the crowns on top of the three lions to differentiate from the age of the English cricket team.

The Football League introduced a new, modern logo that lasted until 2004, featuring a football at the center, outlined by a mashed-up, circular version of the Union Jack that worryingly resembles a Swastika. The Three Lions were ditched, and although one still remained above the soccer ball, it’s contemporary style makes it look more like a house-cat. In 1983, the league also began to introduce headline sponsors, first Cannon and then the Today newspaper, before Barclays took over from 1987 to 1993.

Yet as football became increasingly monetized in the 1990s, the Football League’s branding history became slightly more complex. The Premier League, the old First Division, split off from the Football League altogether and took with it Barclays (who remained as secondary sponsor of the Football League for some time though) and the big bucks. After that, insurance company Endsleigh took over as the Football League’s headline sponsor and experimented with the first joint logo — Endsleigh’s owl on top of a circular union jack, this time righted. But when Nationwide took the reigns in 1996, they returned to unimaginative, cluttered logos.

In 2004, the Football League made their second major logo change. They completely deserted their historical values, lions, and Union Jacks for a sleek, soaring soccer ball with a crown on top. The red and blue color palate didn’t change. This has served the Football League well through a tremendous period of growth and three more sponsors — Coca Cola, NPower and now Sky Bet, who signed in 2013 and will remain the headline sponsor until 2018. Yet in part due to their ever-changing sponsors, the Football League’s brand image is hardly as strong as the that of the Premier League, who have created an outstanding, long-term relationship with Barclays. In the time Barclays has been the Premier League’s headline sponsor, the Football League has had four different affiliations and six different sponsored logos.

Google Trends starkly visualizes this difference, with the “Barclays’ Premier League” being searched at a three to eleven ratio compared to simply the “Premier League” compared to the one to sixty-one ratio between the “Sky Bet Football League” and the “Football League.” Today, the Football League announced its third major rebrand and first name change in its one-hundred-and-thirty-seven year history, to be introduced in the following season. This includes the term of “English” tagged onto its name to form the English Football League and a complete logo overhaul. The new logo features seventy two balls, symbolizing the seventy-two teams throughout the three divisions of the Football League.

At first sight, the new logo is visually appealing enough and looks to target a new, younger demographic as well as attract a new sponsor. Although the logo somewhat resembles that of an energy company and the abbreviation EFL — meant to go hand in hand with the EPL — underneath the ball is clearly disproportioned, perhaps the rebrand can signal a period of stability in the league’s brand image for the first time since it split from the Premier League.

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.