Trash Compactor: On Kit Design, Corporate Logos, and Chelsea
We live in the land of corporate dominance. But for the love of god, at least make your logo look good.
As you are all most likely aware, Chelsea, like most clubs, has new kits coming out for the next season of play. The new designs are a double whammy for Chelsea, because they’ve also got a new shirt sponsor, waving gently to Yokohama as it sails off into the distance. And you are also most likely aware that their new sponsor "3,” just looks absolutely terrible on the front of a soccer kit.
But here’s the thing, the reason why I wanted to make this into a Trash Compactor special: take away the sponsor logo, and these kits are fine. I’d go as far as to say that light blue away kit is Good™, despite the chorus of voices sneering on about how Chelsea are trying to be Manchester City. They’re simple, but Chelsea kits frequently are, and coming off a season where I thought all three Chelsea kits were legitimately stunning, I’m fine with next year’s crop, if I’m a Chelsea fan.
Where does it fall apart? The sponsor logo. That stupid, stupid 3.
Should I care about a corporate logo, whose main job is to give a team bonkers cash just by slapping it on the front of our shirt? Probably not. But I do, because my capitalism-damaged brain likes how corporate sponsor logos look on soccer kits. I like how different they look from almost all other American sports jerseys. They are, for better or worse, part of soccer’s aesthetic now, meaning that jersey design is going to include how the shirt vibes with the sponsor. Which is why 3 is so unfortunate.
Let’s just start with the company’s name. Who names themselves “3”? How is that remotely an interesting name for a company in any respect? I have no idea what the company does (telecommunications), I have no idea where the company is from (Hong Kong), and I have no idea why the company made a logo that looks like a 6th grade kid designing his own NFL jerseys with crayon (the design philosophy behind the number trademark is supposed to look “cool outside and hot on the inside.” I shit you not).
The 3 looks bad. It just does. That light blue away shirt would’ve looked fine and even cool with last year’s sponsor on the front. Now it looks like the Chance the Rapper/Odd Future collaborative mixtape no one wanted, topped with sprinkles.
Then, we come to the most obvious problem, even more than how the 3 looks bad: it’s just confusing. In a sport where players are identified by the numbers they wear, having a different number on the front of the shirt feels weird, discombobulated in some way. Even though I know it’s a sponsor logo, my brain short-circuits every time I see a player facing me with a 3 on their chest. It’s like it’s trying to confuse me. And hey, maybe that’s a legitimate tactic. But I don’t like it.
The most I can say about the 3 logo is that they’re willing to change the color of their logo and not superimposing some fully 3-D logo with colors that don’t make any sense in tandem with the rest of the kit, unlike some shirts of recent memory…
I think part of the reason I liked Chelsea’s kits from the past couple seasons were specifically because I loved how the Yokohama logo looked on the front of their shirts. It gave them a streetwear feel (that streetwear feel being another strike against the 3 logo, given their alternate logo would have made the new Chelsea shirts look like they were designed by Virgil Abloh), and the typeface with the slight red accent worked well with the blue and white shirts. But when Nike put out a third shirt that’s main accent color was orange, did Yokohama still mandate that red Y at the beginning of the logo? Nope! They just made the whole thing white. And the kit, on the whole, looked far better for it.
There is a certain Hall of Fame of corporate logos, teams and companies whose designs seem to work so well together that it’s hard to imagine the two separated. I think Pirelli and Inter Milan sit atop that list, but there have been others that feel somewhat etched in my memory as some great design synergy.
As it stands, the 3 will just be slapped onto those Chelsea jerseys, and it will still look weird with different numbers in a different typeface on the back, and it will still look like it was designed by someone who tried to spray paint flames onto their Toyota Corolla, and the shirts will still look bad overall because of those things. I have passed my judgment.
And Now for a Logo that Doesn’t Suck
Racing Louisville is officially official, and they did basically the one thing every single soccer team in America should be doing when considering their branding at the beginning of their club: hire Matt Wolff.
I, for one, am extremely excited about lavender kits.
My Favorite Axe Murderer Sokratis, Presented Without Comment
And a Thread. Happy Hump Day!
