The Best Football Rebrands Begin With What’s Already There

Every awkward local detail was sanded away until institutions built on place, memory and tribal loyalty began to resemble ambitious fintech companies.

The logic was presented as progress: cleaner on a screen, easier to reproduce, more legible to a global audience. Sometimes it worked, but just as often, it left clubs looking polished but strangely anonymous.

Palermo FC’s new identity takes the opposite view. Its opening line, “Palermo, Too Much Is Never Too Much”, feels more like a useful design instruction than a campaign slogan – which is a good thing. Let me explain.

Palermo is not a city that benefits from restraint. It is pink and black, beauty and disorder, Arab-Norman architecture and Mediterranean light, grandeur next to grit. The smartest decision in the club’s new branding project is not to tidy any of that up, but to make the contradictions its organising principle.

Developed by Palermo and City Football Group’s marketing teams with Alkemy+, the work is built around four ideas: Mosaic, Pink/Black, Born to Fly and Appartenenza.

Written down, they risk sounding like the contents page of a strategy deck, yet in practice, each is attached to something tangible.

Mosaic refers to the cultures that have moved through the city; Pink/Black turns the club’s famous colours into a language of contrast; Born to Fly connects the eagle with ambition; Appartenenza describes the belonging that holds Rosanero supporters together, whether they remain in Sicily or carry the colours elsewhere.

Three bespoke type families sit together like a mosaic, supported by a broader palette, new textures and photography. It’s telling that here, the crest is not the main story. Palermo already has a recognisable symbol, it’s just revealing a world around it.

Football identity now has to do far more than sit on a shirt and above a stadium entrance. I wrote a piece earlier this month about how clubs shouldn’t be afraid to rebrand. This leads on from that.

Nowadays, they publish every day across match graphics, ticketing, retail, documentaries, hospitality, gaming, community work and the endless churn of social media. The badge remains sacred, but it cannot carry all of that alone.

A convincing system should make a club recognisable even when the crest is absent; through the shape of a letter, the rhythm of a layout, the colour of a background or the way a player is photographed. Typography, once an afterthought, is increasingly being asked to carry some of the narrative weight previously placed entirely on the badge.

Sporting CP’s new identity, unveiled for its 120th anniversary, follows a similar logic from a different starting point. JKR did redesign the crest, but rather than pursuing novelty it returned to Sporting’s much-loved 1945 version, refining the shield, lion and SCP monogram without making them anonymous.

Around it sits a wider system informed by five historic symbols: the Porta 10-A entrance at the Estádio José Alvalade, the green-and-white stripes, the shield, the crown-like monogram and the lion.

Even Sporting Sans, the club’s custom typeface, takes its cues from that crown. This is not heritage used as decoration, with an old photograph dropped into a launch film and forgotten by August. The history has been broken down into usable parts.

Werder Bremen is perhaps the clearest expression of this quieter form of change. Created in partnership with Munich-based studio-cum-label SOCIETAS, the club’s epochal diamond remains untouched.

The Werder Green, however, has been made richer and calmer, then surrounded by a considered palette whose names belong to Bremen: Weser Mist Grey, Weser Light Green and Legends Gold.

The best detail is Bruckmeyer Neue, a bespoke serif typeface named after Günther Bruckmeyer, the graphic artist who created the first Werder W in 1924.

Its forms borrow from the geometry of that letter, allowing a century-old piece of club history to shape everything from shirt lettering to stadium graphics. SOCIETAS has not manufactured a new personality for the club, but instead given an existing one more range.

Football has spent years confusing simplification with modernity and reach with universality, producing identities designed to offend nobody and, in the process, mean very little to anyone.

Authenticity is one of branding’s most exhausted words, yet football gives it a particularly unforgiving test. Supporters already know the story and which details matter, which myths are real and which bit of local history has been dragged into a presentation.

You cannot invent Palermo for Palermitani, just as you cannot explain Bremen to people who have spent their lives in green and white. This is why consultation has become an important part of these projects, not simply as protection against backlash, but as a source of material. 

Palermo’s process lasted more than a year and involved supporters, players, staff, former players and partners. Werder chose collaborative development with SOCIETAS rather than a conventional creative pitch, while Sporting’s identity was constructed from symbols that already carried meaning within the institution.

Admittedly, none of this guarantees approval, because football fans can find an argument in the angle of a serif, but it changes the designer’s role. They aren’t imposing a vision, they’re editing, translating and deciding what deserves to travel forward.

Palermo is the most intriguing case because the club sits inside City Football Group, whose scale naturally invites suspicion whenever global growth meets the identity of a fiercely particular city. The risk is obvious: local culture can become an export asset, its rough edges aestheticised for an international audience.

Yet the new system appears conscious. Its ambition is global, but its ingredients are stubbornly local. Pink isn’t just a fashionable colourway, but the start of the story. The mosaic isn’t a graphic device, it’s an acknowledgement that Palermo’s identity has always been made through collision and migration.

Werder’s two-to-three-year rollout also understands that a system becomes credible through repetition. Palermo faces the same test as its new language moves through the stadium, merchandise, digital channels and official communications.

If it remains coherent without becoming rigid, and local without becoming folkloric, it will have, if nothing else, given Palermo a better way to recognise itself. This is where the best football rebrands are heading.

Sporting looked back to 1945. Werder found a typeface inside a letter drawn in 1924. Palermo began with the colour it has worn for more than a century.

The lesson here is not that every club needs a bespoke font or a poetic name, it’s that identity cannot be imported and the strongest rebrands aren’t forcing a narrative, they’re instead asking how modern design can help it look more unmistakably like itself.