A new badge at Newcastle United - A case for the (digital) defence

I want to start what is going to be a very divisive article with the hugest of huge caveats; and that is that I love Newcastle United’s current club badge. It’s all I’ve ever known as a supporter and has been on every shirt I’ve ever owned, bar a retro Kevin Keegan era shirt with the circle badge with the Magpie, the River Tyne, and the castle.

Watching the lads lift the Carabao Cup in March with the current badge emblazoned on their chests and on ours, is a moment etched in time and one I (despite only being in my thirty’s) and many others had suspected they may never experience. The badge encompasses and encapsulates: highs, lows, births, deaths, traditions, rituals, and everything else that is wrapped up in our Newcastle United supporting identities – put simply, it matters.

But it is also the fourth crest in Newcastle United’s history. Part of a 1988 rebrand, the current badge took the club back closer to its first ever crest (based the on the city’s coat of arms) after two decades with circular badges which are the darling of many-a football club badge rebrand in the modern era.

Yet, a redesign of United’s ‘brand’ was always on the horizon (more on that below) and, in fact, the winning of the Carabao Cup this season may have inadvertently sped this process up, as it will act as an almost the perfect final act for a badge which is almost universally beloved.

Why do ‘brands’ rebrand?

I know many will hate the very fact that I’ve called United a brand but there’s no getting away from the fact that that is exactly what the club is in the modern world, and in that world of branding and marketing, dynamism, energy and adaptability are principal concerns, and many companies have faced the daunting decision to change their iconic logos over the years despite it seeming counterintuitive to do so.

Upending a well-established visual representation of a brand’s identity can be hugely risky, especially when you factor in all the additional complications of emotive tradition and history associated with football clubs.

Visual brand identifiers hold enormous power, but they can become old fashioned or outdated as per modern aesthetics. Design preferences and technologies will also change making older designs unwieldy or difficult to work with. The very essence of a brand may change – its values evolve, and this transformation can necessitate a need to rebrand away from a well-known traditional visual identifier.

Our ever-evolving digital marketing world has almost entirely superseded physical, traditional marketing materials (with 83% of first contacts with a brand being digital amongst millennials, 95%+ with Gen Z, and even at 20% among the ‘Boomer’ generation) so a modern brands visual identifiers must be adaptable to different digital mediums – from everyday social apps you’ve heard of like ‘X’ and ‘Tik Tok’ to international apps you haven’t like ‘Weibo’ and ‘BeReal’. Different screen sizes are also a hugely important concern to digital marketers when designing logos and collateral – and these will certainly be under consideration by those tasked with this process at United.

Simply put a logo (or badge) that works well on physical products, as we can all attest to when we just look at our club shirts or branded merchandise, may not translate well to digital platforms.

In the context of modern design and digital trends, the current club badge can be considered difficult to work with; it’s why everywhere you look on the clubs official website they use a simplified black and white version – dropping the blue, red, gold, and grey colours completely. There will also be issues with detail loss when resizing and resolution changes too due to the complicated nature of the current badge.

Modernism vs Tradition

Newcastle United and its fans will never be generic or off-the-rack and hold a great respect for tradition and storied history, so it pains us when initiatives like this (and the new stadium) are announced and we are presented with bland, minimalist circular badges and soulless bowl shaped architectural designs (both still hypothetical at the moment, of course) that are the most generic of generic designs.

The support of the club is multi-cultured, multi-national, varied, and traditional all at the same time and somehow the current badge (for a lot of people) perfectly defines that aspect of the club and it’s aesthetically pleasing too, gliding between the aforementioned modern and traditional sensibilities.

But a mostly digital world, or a digital first world, places different demands on brands and sometimes they have to make difficult decisions in the moment that will, in time, become traditions of their own – much like the 1988 rebrand, the Adidas logo, and countless others over the years.

What is abundantly clear is that this is going to be a hugely emotive issue and will be a road the club will have to tread down very carefully - very carefully indeed as there are a couple of notable current examples (Leeds and Aston Villa) of club badge redesigns being a disaster-class in rebranding - something the club can ill-afford and will erode much of the goodwill built up by the club since the takeover.

P.S. Whatever that nonsense claimed by Newcastle World to be ‘leaked’ images of a Newcastle United redesigned badge is certainly not it – it is ugly and it doesn’t actually really change anything for a digital world whilst being worse in every conceivable way than the current club badge.