It took 26 years and 18 days, but Major League Soccer’s longest surviving original team visual identity is now dead.
With today’s unveiling of the New England Revolution’s new crest and brand identity, every one of the league’s original clubs — the ones that are left, anyway — have now changed their look from what they launched with in 1996. Five of the league’s surviving nine original franchises have changed their name, too. Even the league itself changed its logo several years ago.
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Let’s get this out of the way: the Revolution’s new crest is fine. It’s actually pretty good. That’s subjective, of course, and by no means am I declaring myself the arbiter of American soccer design tastes, but the design is attractive enough. And the Revolution’s old logo — commonly referred to by Revs fans as the “crayon flag” — absolutely looked dated, and not in any particularly good way.
It's Time. pic.twitter.com/pbbtUVuzFv
— s – New England Revolution (@NERevolution) November 4, 2021
The story of that logo’s trademark “distressed” look is a funny one that speaks to how approaches to design have changed over the last 25 years. In 1995, as the league sought to craft its original brand identities, clubs were assigned to a particular manufacturer. Nike and Adidas handled the bulk of that work, but the Revs ended up working with Reebok. As a Revs executive wandered through their design studio, past pairs of inflatable shoes and posters of Dee Brown, a logo emblazoned on a pair of tennis shoes caught his eye.
He sought out the designer who created it and asked if it could be modified for use as the Revs logo. It could, the designer told him, but he added a wrinkle: the felt-tipped pen he used to draw the shoe logo only had enough ink left in it for one more use. He sat down and in one shot drew up the crayon flag, the wear on the pen’s tip and its waning ink responsible for the logo’s painted look.
The end result was pretty fantastic — a worn, weathered American flag, a soccer ball taking the place of the stars, its six panels representing the six states of New England. With some intentionality, the design roughly mirrored the logo for the 1994 World Cup, at the time — and still — the most formative soccer event in U.S. history.
That logo took about a month to create. The Revolution’s new identity, well, that took a bit longer.
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“In some ways, informally, (the process) probably started in the order of a decade ago,” Revolution president Brian Bilello told The Athletic. “We really began to look at our brand identity. There was so much happening within the league and a little bit within our own club, we thought about a need to update the look of the club.”
The Revolution had initially thought to peg the rebrand around a new stadium; but as rumors of a new facility came and went, and years started to pass, the club crafted a new plan — in some ways a more holistic approach that incorporated a rebrand into a wider overhaul of the club that included new players, a new coach, a new training facility and the like.
Formal discussions of the rebrand started in earnest about three years ago. In 2019, the club enlisted the help of a third party to perform market research in regards to perception of the original logo and name, and what consumers wanted out of a new identity. They polled a wide swath of people, from die-hard Revs supporters and casual fans of the club to sports fans at large.
Participants were polled on a broad range of topics, but most fascinating, potentially, was their response when asked about their perception of the Revolution as a whole — on and off the field. Those responses varied from supportive and loyal to disdainful. The logo was described as boring, outdated, plain. “If you can’t bother to update the logo, it means leadership doesn’t care,” said one respondent. Another boiled down years of frustration into a single comment: “(Our identity) says ‘I’ve been watching mediocre soccer since the mid-’90s.’”
That staid perception of the logo was near-universal. As other clubs have moved toward more modern designs — many of which, ironically, evoke more traditional looks — the Revolution’s logo has proved problematic in any number of ways, according to Bilello.
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“It was really hard to activate,” said the Revolution president. “Whether it’s on merchandise or advertising, it just doesn’t travel well. You can’t really break it up and use parts of it, you can’t really do a lot with it. As much as we wanted to make sure we were staying true to who we are and to our fans, there’s a practical side of it, too — (any logo) has to be usable in a lot of different ways in order to get your brand out there in ways that are really active.”
Over the course of the study, another basic tenant emerged: many of the same participants who felt the logo needed to be redone were also insistent that the name of the club remain the same. It came as a surprise to some at the club, many of whom were ready to move on from the original identity — name, logo, colors — as a whole.
“We heard really loud and clear that it was really important to keep some of the identity that we’ve developed over these 26 years,” said Bilello. “That was really important to our fans. When it comes to the name, to the colors and really having a mark that in some ways pays homage to where we’ve come from. We were able to accomplish all of that.”
During the three-year design process, a few other events gave Revs management a peek at how a rebrand can sway public perception, good or bad. The Chicago Fire rolled out what’s probably universally considered as the worst logo in MLS history (sorry to the Mutiny’s ‘cyberbat’) before changing course and reworking the logo again. The Columbus Crew faced their own backlash when they updated not only the club’s crest but also changed their name. Bilello said the club gleaned some information from those failed rebrands, but they were so far along into their own that it didn’t affect the end design.
In a twist that more directly impacted them, the Revolution’s logo was discovered on the personal website of one of the designers who worked on the thing about four months before the official rollout. Some fans speculated the club had leaked it intentionally, seeking to test the waters and avoid the type of backlash faced by Columbus and Chicago. Though the league itself tracked the sentiment surrounding the leak, the Revs insist they had nothing to do with it.
“There’s a lot of sentiment out there like we did it on purpose to see what people think,” said Bilello. “The reality is we have a lot of time and energy spent on it — to have something like that leak out is very frustrating, especially since our plan was not to announce it right away. If it’s a week out, or a couple days out, you’re like, alright, but it was just so early. It was frustrating to see that out there. But I won’t say we didn’t pay attention to what was going on, what people were saying about the design.”
With the design’s official rollout, The Revolution sought to portray a few of its broader concepts, in particular the spirit of “revolutionary defiance” embodied by the country’s founding fathers. The crest’s primary lettering — simply a white “R” — was designed in a style that evokes the sort of typefaces used during revolutionary times, particularly the style used in the East India Tea Company’s wordmark. It’s framed by an outline designed to emulate the shape of traditional flag drapery and bunting. A red, diagonal line through the center of the logo was the club’s attempt at inspiring that feeling of defiance.
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The club itself preferred the logo as a standalone crest, but the league requires clubs to incorporate their names into their crests, so the Revs threw their name and founding year around the logo in a roundel. The end result is a handsome effort that, in my view, seems to achieve the stated design goals. The club has accompanied the new design with an obligatory logo explainer. See for yourself:
Nicer than the logo, though, are the new secondary symbols, and one in particular: the pine tree. The Revs have used the symbol, plucked directly from 17th-century, pre-revolutionary flags, for some time as a detail on some of its kits. As a standalone, framed in a triangle and bordered by the year of the club’s founding, it works beautifully.
What’s missing from those secondary marks, in my view, is a call back to the original logo, that lovely crayon flag. I asked a club executive if they’d ever considered retaining the design in some way, shape or form, or if they felt an obligation to preserve it. They didn’t, that person said, adding that the original logo would be “sunsetted” at the end of this season. Most fans won’t shed any tears.
I can’t help but feel a sense of loss as the crayon flag disappears into the sunset. Unpacking the Revolution’s rebrand makes for a fascinating look at how we, as sports fans, perceive permanence and history. It’s boiled down nicely by one participant in the study the club performed. “Other teams have a permanence and a timelessness, but our logo looks like a worn pair of jeans.”
It says something, I think, that the logos of MLS’ modern clubs — NYCFC, LAFC and the like — speak to a consumer’s brain as being “timeless” and “permanent” while the crayon flag, which was literally the only bit of the league’s original visual identity remaining, is cast aside. Or that a worn pair of jeans, an artifact that, in theory, has achieved its look through lived experience, through miles of wear and tear, blood, sweat and the like, is perceived as “dated.”
Maybe what that participant is thinking about isn’t a worn, weathered old pair of Levi’s 501s. Maybe they’re thinking about a pair of acid-wash jeans from the ‘90s, blasted with chemicals to create some sort of faux authenticity. MLS’ original design choices, it’s worth noting, were made in an era where design impermanence was rapidly becoming the norm. Had the league been founded in some other era — maybe the middle of the 20th century, for example — it might have more “timeless” survivors.
Peter Moore designed the Columbus Crew’s original logo, maybe the most iconic piece of design in MLS history. When I asked him about the league’s constant design evolution last year, he put things pretty simply.
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“All of this change, the constant change in design, is just to have new things to sell,” said Moore, his voice marked by frustration. “It is now a business and no longer a passion or badge of honor. How can you feel proud wearing a jersey that is going to change next month, or one that’s thrown out because it’s no longer trendy? To me it’s a sign of not believing in your product, and that then reflects the team and the fans. The New York Yankees baseball hat has not ever changed, to my knowledge … and it is still the No. 1 (Major League Baseball) hat sold today.”
“You want to sell more merchandise?” He concluded. “Win more games, win more championships.”
The league, though, continues to search for its own visual identity. Twenty six years into this, you’d think the league and its clubs, who are constantly flailing in an attempt to create a perception of authenticity and quality, would realize that those things are frequently hard-earned, only granted by fans and observers when teams pay more attention to things happening on the field and less attention to focus groups.
After setting an all-time record for most points earned in a season, the Revs, at least, seem to be doing a bit of both.
(Images: New England Revolution)