Why Are MLS Teams Obsessed With Rebrands?

i cannot claim to be a passionate follower of the mls there is only so much football one person can watch while still holding down a job and taking care of all the other vagaries of life but i do watch the odd game on sky sports or free sports over here in the uk and i tried to stay abreast with all the latest developments going on across the atlantic partly because i found it quite interesting and partly because i feel a slight sense of obligation to do so given that almost 15 of hitch 7 subscribers are based in either the usa or canada and i'm well aware that most european football channels either pay the league no attention or treat it with a sort of snobbish direction so i'd like to be something of an exception on that front as someone who likes to think of myself as being fairly well versed in the goings-on of the united states top flight then i was a bit taken aback in the build up to christmas when i was planning a where are they now video and i discovered that montreal impacts were now clubbed a foot montreal or simply cf montreal a quick google revealed that the name change was less than a week old which made me feel a bit less stupid but the ease or nonchalance with which the canadian outfit had undergone a total rebrand seemed to be alien to me as someone looking at it from a british or eurocentric perspective it's important to note that cf montreal's rebrand wasn't actually as seamless as i'm suggesting there was concrete opposition from a section of the club supporters but i'll come back to that in a moment the fact is that mls teams change names crests brands and identities on a far more frequent basis than anything we are used to here in england across all of europe or indeed in south america basically anywhere where football or soccer culture has had strong roots for a century or more so i thought i'd make a video examining some of the reasons in my eyes at least as to why this may be the case in case any of you don't believe me though i'll just start off by showing you all what i mean here are the club crests of the 10 founding members of major league soccer all the way back in 1996 the same year that the first mission impossible movie came out and that i was born though i also stress that those two events were entirely unrelated and they are positioned alongside the 10 badges crests logos whatever you want to call them of those 10 teams today the last of the 10 tampa bay mutiny famously the club of carlos valderrama for a couple of seasons were dissolved in 2002 hence why there isn't an updated version of their video game inspired badge as you can see though new england revolution are the only sad not to have experienced a rebrand of one kind or another and most teams have experienced wholesale changes i should point out that even this image is a few years old and that dc united who probably have the most similar crest in this image have since had a rebrand of their own and this is their current badge rather than the one in that graphic of the 10 only half namely la galaxy dc united columbus crew new england revolution and colorado rapids even have the same name meanwhile dallas byrne became fc dallas kansas city whiz became the kansas city wizards before being renamed once again to sporting kansas city though they're often referred to simply as sporting kc san jose clash and now the san jose earthquakes and the new york new jersey metro stars a rare example of a team with the name of two places in their name separated by a slash symbol are obviously now the new york rebels rebrands were particularly common in the league's early years but they've remained a relatively frequent theme over the last decade or so la galaxy had a big rebrand upon the arrival of david beckham columbus crew binned their brilliant yet bizarre old badge in favor of a more traditional design in 2014 and chicago fire threw out a bit of a curveball even more recently in 2019 when they went from this to this which went down like a lead balloon among supporters i won't go through every mls rebrand we'd be here all week but you get the idea cf montreal are just the latest in a long line with their name change also heralding a totally new crest so hopefully you all believe me now if nothing else but why is this the case i think one of the key factors you have to bear in mind is that a lot of the early mls club crests and names were quite out there i mean just take miami fusion who folded in 2002. you simply don't get names like that in the top flights of english spanish or italian football in many respects the names of mls teams early on were like the nasl team names two pointer who could forget the dallas tornado the atlanta chiefs or the new york cosmos from all those years ago but as the league matured there seemed to be an eagerness to move to more mature names i'm putting that word in quotation marks just so you know in the years since we've seen a certain degree of anglicizing or at least an effort for american clubs to sound more european now everyone will have their own opinions on this but personally i think it's a bit of a shame i recently discovered a team in ghana's top flight called cape coast mysterious aboaster dwarfs which to me is a far more interesting and unique name than say cape coast united i think difference ought to be celebrated tis better to be unique than to be a poor imitation it's almost as though mls teams are seeking more respect from other parts of the world who might have considered names like the kansas city wizards to be gimmicky but is that not preferable to names like new york city fc and into miami in some respects i don't know maybe it's just me i also find it slightly strange when a brand new team calls themselves something united given that the united suffix exists to describe a team that was forged out of the merging of two or more clubs but we're all stuck on a rock flying around a giant ball of gas and plasma at over 67 000 miles an hour just waiting for it to blow up at some point so i won't lose any sleep over nashville's mls franchise calling themselves nashville united so i think a lot of the early mls rebrands were basically efforts to be taken more seriously by an international and domestic audience and also just a simple fact of young teams in a young league looking to find their feet this is as true in 2021 as it was in 2001 the mls is still an extremely young league compared to europe's top flights provided you consider the premier league to just be a continuation of the first division for all meaningful purposes which i do as such it doesn't really make sense to compare football in america in 2021 with football in england in 2021 but rather it would make more sense to compare the countries at similar stages in their development the mls turns 25 in 2021 when the football league turned 25 in 1913-14 the league already had a very different look about it to when it had started in 1888-89 the division's first champions preston north end were actually relegated that season accrington had been dissolved in 1886 and stoke who were now a non-league team had been founded as stoke ramblers then they became stoke football club and eventually stoke city fc in 1925 so it has to be taken into account that the mls is a young league and that teams therefore have less history and less long-running tradition than they do in other parts of the world when i think of my own team whole city our owner's efforts to rename the club hull tigers was met with such fierce supporter opposition that not only did the football association reject the name change application our owners vow to sell the club still waiting on that front and they basically ended up pulling funding from the team out of spite towards supporters for not blindly welcoming their stupid idea it was a similar story at cardiff city albeit with a happier ending where vince and tan changed the club's traditional colours from blue to red and the club's badge along with it supporters protested with a little initial success but just three years later tan reversed the decision and the blue birds are blue once again now as i alluded to earlier it is not that football or soccer fans in the us have not opposed rebrands in the past they certainly have chicago fire's change of badge went down so badly with fans that the club has promised a new design to appease them meanwhile in canada 5000 cf montreal fans signed a petition protesting the club's major rebrand with the backing of the club's largest supporters group though it seems less likely that their protestations will have as much success despite these instances of opposition though it would be disingenuous to suggest that there wasn't a difference between the name change at say cf montreal and the one at hull city simply due to the history that is baked into both cases there isn't the same generational attachment to something like the name of a team that goes back generations to grandparents and great grandparents that's why the mls is much more akin to the english game roughly a century or so ago when we saw dial square become woolwich arsenal and eventually just arsenal or newton heath who later became manchester united there are numerous examples of similar name changes across the european game from the early 20th century and who is to say that the names of mls teams won't be much more fixed in a hundred years time you know if the giant ball of gas hasn't exploded and we haven't all managed to blow each other up by then it also has to be said that us sports are far more image conscious and brand orientated than teams from any other part of the world of course the us is commercialization and marketing on steroids so the fact that mls teams have a particular focus in this department compared to their peers across the rest of the world is hardly surprising in europe almost without exception the most valuable and lucrative football teams are the most successful ones the most profitable clubs in england are manchester united manchester city and liverpool in germany it's by munich ambrosia dortmund in france these days it is psg and in spain it's barcelona and real madrid oh and in italy it is juventus with inter and ac milan making up a little bit of ground again now unsurprisingly just as their team improves their performances on the pitch and becomes competitive again it isn't a direct correlation between say the top four or six teams in the premier league with the highest revenue finishing in the top four or the top six every season but it tends to give you a pretty good idea in u.s sports this isn't the case on-field success is not a golden ticket to commercial success a number of factors can rival and even exceed results and trophies in terms of importance just take la galaxy in the 2007 and 2008 seasons the team from california came out head and shoulders in front of every other mls team in terms of revenue and valuation according to forbes yet they finished fifth and sixth in the eastern conference in each of those two seasons and 11th and 13th in the mls table overall the fact that they weren't very good didn't matter though because they were based in la and they had david beckham it's a similar story in the nba the nfl etc etc in the premier league the best way to attract domestic and international support is to buy better players win more games and enjoy more success whilst this isn't the default position in u.s sports maybe this is one aspect where the mls should seek to replicate the european game and it should be said we have seen a shift in that direction in terms of the types of players that teams are looking to sign atlanta united are perhaps the best example or prior to 2020 they were at least they only joined the mls in 2017 but the club put an emphasis on signing talented hungry young designated players like miguel almeron joseph martinez and as equal barco they played good football they got fans through the door by offering them cheap tickets and they got them hooked on the sport in only their second season atlanta united won the mls cup with the highest average attendance in the history of the mls over 50 000 which is on par with some of the biggest clubs in europe they are also now the most valuable franchise in the mls valued at 500 million dollars the reality is that america is the marketing and [ __ ] capital of the world and while some rebrands can be successful they're often just an alternative to addressing and fixing real systemic issues but if there is a dollar to be made convincing some idiots in middle management they're having a different animal on your crest or a more vibrant shade of purple on your shirt is the key to turning you into the next fc barcelona despite the fact that your center forward hasn't scored a goal in eight months and your keeper couldn't even catch coronavirus at one of donald trump's parties at the white house well you can bet there'll be 500 firms queuing up to knock on your door and tell you that they're your man so that is my hot take on mls rebrands anyway i'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments did i miss a key reason is there a more subtle points at hand or do you reckon that i've hit the nail on the head it can't be the last one surely then again there's a first for everything either way thank you all as ever for watching it is joy

Channel: HITC Sevens

Views: 167,330

Keywords: HITC Sevens, Football, Soccer, MLS, Major League Soccer, Rebrands, Branding, USMNT, United States, LA Galaxy, Montreal, New York Red Bulls, FC Dallas, HITC Sport, Sporting KC, Premier League, USA, HITC, Sevens, Chicago Fire, Documentary, Finance, Columbus Crew, Team, Clubs, Logos

Id: 47i95MORrug

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021