The American Influence (Part 1)
How US soccer helped shape the Portobello FC brand
Being English and being born in the 90s, I grew up as a massive David Beckham fan. After Thierry Henry (I am a Gooner if you didn’t know), David Beckham is easily my favourite player of all time and when he left Real Madrid in 2007 to join MLS-side LA Galaxy I was intrigued as to what MLS was and how soccer in the U S of A differed from football here in the UK.
To be honest however, my interest didn't last very long at that point in my life. For me, MLS was just a random league on the FIFA video game series that you would use when you wanted to take a break from playing with the ‘proper teams’. Even with the arrival of Thierry Henry, Frank Lampard, David Villa, Andrea Pirlo and others, MLS was still something I, like most people here in the UK and across Europe, was not particularly interested in.
This changed however when I decided to start a football club. Being different and standing out was always central to my vision for the club and I knew if Portobello FC was to succeed, I would have to look further afield for inspiration.
At the time, David Beckham was in the process of launching Inter Miami and I was a big fan of the identity and branding of the club he was building. It was different to anything we had here in the UK. Not wanting to simply copy Inter Miami, I decided to further explore the landscape of US Soccer for further inspiration and came across so many interesting designs for clubs that had names that you would never come across here in the UK!
There were three clubs, in addition to Inter Miami, that were particularly influential and if you are familiar with US soccer and have seen the Portobello FC badge before, this should not be a surprise. They were:
Las Vegas Lights
Forward Madison FC
Oakland Roots SC
The similarities between Portobello FC and Las Vegas Lights are pretty clear - I basically stole their colour scheme. Yellow, pink and blue against a black background, perfect. Portobello Road is a place of colour so I wanted this reflected in the badge. The use of black (along with white text) allowed me to bring these three bright colours together without them clashing.
What I liked most about the Forward Madison FC badge was that it was fun - it didn’t take itself too seriously. Sometimes in this sport, I feel, especially here in the UK, we’re too afraid to have fun - everybody wants to be cool and in doing so it becomes ‘minimalist’ and boring. Forward Madison’s use of a flamingo, also got me thinking about which animal I could potentially use. A peacock made sense due to the bold and colourful nature of our neighbourhood but it would also pay homage to the Notting Hill Carnival in which many of the costumes worn by performers are peacock-inspired. We also have several peacocks in our local park as well. It all tied together.
I knew of the Oakland Roots SC brand before I found out they were a soccer club. The people behind the Roots clearly understood the power of good design, and merchandising. I wanted to create a brand that people would be happy to wear on a t-shirt or on a cap. At the level we are at, where we don’t have any other sources of income, this is incredibly important!
It was very much a light-bulb moment when all these ideas came together. I was at my desk, working on my laptop, and put together a very very rough design together in Adobe InDesign.
I was very fortunate to find Owen, a graphic designer, who was able to take my ideas and produce the badge as you see it today! Owen was great to work with - very patient, ensuring my vision was realised in full (which it was). If you are a football club or any other kind of sports team, new or existing, looking to produce a new badge/identity, I would highly recommend reaching out to Owen (click here to view more of his work).
I recently did a Twitter interview with Ben about Portobello FC - the first time I have ever done any kind of interview before. It was really great to speak about the project - you can listen to it here:
In my next post I will continue to talk about the American Influence, including my interest in the USA’s 3rd Division League, NISA, and how we ended up working with sportswear brand Icarus.