Every Friday, ‘half-decent’ football magazine When Saturday Comes sends out its Weekly Howl email. Each one contains a detailed history of the badge design of an obscure football club.
The critiques are written by Cameron Carter. Here are a few recent favourites.
Sheikh Russel, Bangladesh
“A beautiful, lyrical badge. The story behind the image is as follows: Russel, a Bangladeshi boy of lowly stock, is given by his parents (father is a woodsman, mother a soap sculptor) a name so tedious it marginalises him in village society. One day, as he is wandering around the alluvial plan that makes up a large part of Bangladesh’s surface area, he spies a beautiful dove struggling to free itself from some plastic packaging, a by-product of the Coca-Cola corporation’s global imperialism. The dove is tired and is about to give up the struggle. Little Russel is powerless to help it (Russel has a condition called Learned Helplessness – he doesn’t problem-solve) and weeps over the dove’s snow-white drooping neck. One of the boy’s tears falls on the wound, pooling with ruby-red blood, and lies there like a pearl. Slowly the dove opens an eye, life returns to its broken body and, marvellous to see, it is able to raise itself into the limitless sky.
From that day hence the little village was smiled upon by the gods, its harvests were plentiful and its river never ran dry. Also it got a leisure centre that was opened by Jimi Mistry. For his part in this, Russel was feted in the area and loved and protected by all. He was named Dove Boy. After that he went into tertiary education – some say he got a City & Guilds in Retail & Distribution – and then he got a job and the village sort of lost touch with him.”
Skenderbeu Korce, Albania
“What kind of man – or woman, for that matter – takes on a commission to design a football team’s badge, goes away for a few days to his Imagineering room and emerges with an image of a creature half rabbit, half round-topped winter bonnet? Following extensive investigation there still appears to be no culture that will admit to including such an entity in its mythology. There are stories told in the rural north of Albania of a creature half-goat, half Alpine Homburg that inhabits dense forest and forewarns those it encounters of a death in the family or, at the very least, a work-based appraisal. But this is the closest our research gets us to the Skenderbeu icon.
From its expression it doesn’t appear to be a terrorising kind of figure, it just appears to be cheerfully off-balance in a strong wind. So it is not obvious what the club are attempting to get across here, unless they are giving us a glimpse of an alternate reality inhabited by mild-mannered grotesques. An absolute enigma.“
Espérance Sportive de Tunis, Tunisia
“Now, this badge displays the kind of citizen that former Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali presumably believed lived in his country. A cheery, placid young fellow, with no more thought of political dissent in his curly-mopped head than a badger might contemplate taking a taxi to the next field. Eager to Please is written all over his youthful face as he looks up towards his political leaders (out of picture), awaiting his next instruction. Unfortunately, after years of zero tolerance for any kind of oppositional protest or criticism of his regime, Ben Ali has found that there are among his population people with sterner countenances and less wavy hair who wish to be employed and also be permitted a little more freedom of expression.
This element, who likely do not dress in as colourful clothes as the pictured boy, has taken the country by surprise by marching around in large numbers and being rather uncivil. Some of them even went so far as to provoke their police into shooting them, simply by swarming around the place looking menacing. Perhaps, right now in a lonely hotel room, Ben Ali is wondering what became of the little stripy-topped smiley boy – at what point did he drop the plastic football and pick up a rock?”
Kecskeméti TE, Hungary
“I suppose this was considered very modern at the time. I suppose it is a very clever thing to have a badge with just shapes on it when you know everyone wants to see a tiger with a sword and a castle. The light arched shape across the top is symmetrical enough but just as we begin to relax and think we can show this design to mother, we come upon the violent shard of glass that is the lower light shape. And why place the year of the club’s founding on the level when you can just as easily make it lean at a 45-degree angle and disorientate the common herd? This daringly unnecessary innovation recalls the poet Baudelaire’s lines: “See the dead Years lean down, In dated dress, from balconies in heaven; Behold Regret rise from the deep, unbowed…” I forget the rest but it was probably about catching syphilis off a prostitute so this is almost certainly the cleanest bit anyway. So yes, very fresh at the time, one imagines, very shocking (it is reported by a contemporary critic that some ladies in Austro-Hungarian football stadiums screamed and fainted when first exposed to the badge) but ultimately, when the moment has passed and we have all calmed down, a little bit dull.”
FCM Targu Mures, Romania
“Last week’s badge was all about lines. No pictures, just lines. It was utterly shocking. This week’s badge is at the other end of the design spectrum. Targu Mures hope to intimidate the opposition with this image of an armed bear. In the olden days – that is pre-Premier League – errant knights would roam the hills and valleys of Romania, either seeking adventure and remuneration from the local landowner or, in some cases, preying on the weak and infirm. It is often hard to spot the difference between the weak and the infirm, but, as a rule of thumb, it is the infirm who are wandering about late at night dressed only in a car coat.
It soon became apparent that some of these opportunist knights were bears. This was bad news for the frightened Romanian villagers. Meeting a bear in the wild was bad enough, but they at least knew they could ward it off by fiddling with polystyrene or imitating the vocal inflections of Heather Small. But an armed bear – this would have been hard to prepare against. It was probably not the best time to be a Romanian villager. The bear in the picture is just about to hack down the halogen spotlights simply because he doesn’t understand them.”
Spielvereinigung Unterhaching
“This team is probably the German equivalent of Hamilton Academicals, the name being an absolute joy to enunciate when asked which team one follows: “Which team do I support you ask? Well, let me see now – stand well back everyone, mind those champagne flutes…” The badge itself is similarly enjoyable and has a rather jolly air about it. It seems that four friends are attending a funfair and, having perhaps drunk heavily, are now piled into a dodgem car, seeking kicks. Normally the tousle-haired ruffian who runs the dodgems would rebuke the party for health and safety reasons, but it appears he has given them the benefit of the doubt here because there are four of them and there is a military flavour to their singing. We all know there is a dark side to pleasure, as anyone would discover if they attempted to prevent these hearties having their fun. As for the message the club intend to convey, it is possibly just that they like going to the fair. Or there may be a deeper meaning here, one of solidarity – Togetherness Through Drink (which was also the old Arsenal motto when Tony Adams was captain).”
Pattaya United FC, Thailand
“I know what you’re thinking – another bleeding cetacean. We had a mostly-out-of-shot whale three weeks ago, the badge designer having opted for the daringly elliptical approach of depicting merely the departing tail and splash of his subject. Here, however, we have the subject centre stage, in full crowd-pleasing action pose. This is precisely the type of dolphin you would expect to see in any Ocean World Fun Park, balancing balls on its head, jumping through hoops and tottering along the surface for fish. This is a corporate, on-message cetacean. An Uncle Tom dolphin, posing for the camera in such a way as to perpetuate centuries of received wisdom of his kind as non-threatening human sidekick and anti-depressant aqua-buddy. This view of the dolphin is a relatively modern one, originating, it is widely thought, in a Victorian text by the Reverend AK Minton, Some Brief Notes on the Relative Approachability of Dolphins and Tiger Sharks. The Ancient Greeks believed dolphins were arseholes.”
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