Ed Ruscha, "Music From The Balconies"

“There’s no formula; (the concepts) just have to be emotionally loaded. It may be something I hear on the radio, or a lyric from a song… It’s a simple thing.” Ed Ruscha (primarily noted as an artist) distills his methodology in this straightforward description, and Michael Beirut (a graphic designer) co-opts it in his collection of essays on design, chiefly to frame artistic process in terms of Beirut’s own profession. For creative endeavors related to the sport of association football, Ruscha’s words ring favorably.

In a previous article, the formal identity development of the European Championships was outlined. Another currently in production will do the same for the FIFA World Cup, in advance of the tournament’s kickoff in South Africa. But here, as a link between the two, let’s look at some of the aesthetic choices undertaken away from corporate branding by persons or institutions whose primary focus isn’t necessarily football.

As inspiration, I’ve absorbed the excellent book Football Graphics (Thames & Hudson, 1998) by Jeremy Leslie and Patrick Burgoyne – though older and wanting of a follow-up, it’s still full of wonderful images and writing on the then-current aesthetic state of the sport. Amid spreads of the original 1995 MLS logos and screen grabs of Sky Sports’ mid-decade “innovative match experience” is a great deal of exploration into the nascent rivalry of that era, one still raging today: Nike v adidas.

Yuri Gagarin, Alexei Leonov, Patrick Kluivert

Some really fabulous images are included (some reproduced here) of the sportswear companies’ respective campaigns to define themselves as the brand closest to the hearts of athletes and fans, and closest to their respective ambitions. And they went to great lengths to set themselves apart in their advertising. Nike at one point featured the Dutch team as individual videogame heroes, including Patrick Kluivert as Sputnik-Man (apparently). Adidas countered with a campaign that saw cloned Matthias Sammers and Paul Inces battle it out in some sort of secret laboratory. As budgets increased and ads became more elaborate, Nike produced the still-famous Good Versus Evil spot that saw Nike’s nine biggest stars (plus Jorge Campos and Tab Ramos) battle Satan’s XI on the pampas of hades and convinced every crap striker in Christendom to pop his or her collar before shooting.

In fact, if anything, ads as these solidified the star system in football. As basketball or baseball in the United States has relied on individual star power to drive revenues and ratings, early nineties football was still a relatively level ground in terms of big names. But via their existing worldwide marketing, Nike and adidas could propel the Cantonas and Klinsmanns to a status beyond their clubs or countries. The real origins of how Brand Beckham became global lie in this primordial conflict.

Hull City, 1992.

But for manufacturers of gear, a fans’ ultimate judgment is reserved for one thing: the shirt. Shirt design can and has made or broken perception of many an equipment sponsor, generating huge revenues and goodwill, or protests and outright scorn. New printing techniques allowed more adventurous concepts in this era, but even then pushing the envelope was usually reserved for goalkeeper or away shirts. Fabulous and intricate sublimated computer graphics popped up everywhere, even in a traditional line like Umbro’s. And much in line with Ruscha, they often seemed to be based on little but the whims of the designer. If you worked for a clothing manufacturer, it seemed you could get away with anything.

The 90s was where passion and technology caught up with one another in soccer. The limitlessness of fervor was unburdened by traditional limitations on style. The presentation of the game became as important as the game itself. As John Gill says in Football Graphics, “Football is not just about the game but about so much else. The passion for football is informed by life itself.”

Gill was the curator of “Offside,” a late 90s exhibition of football in contemporary art that featured prominent global artists like the now Turner Prize winning Mark Wallinger. Gill suggests the power of the game to speak to much more is set in simply pitting two ‘warring factions’ against each other: “[We can use our] passion for the game to open up other ideas like nationalism, commercialism, fanaticism. …it becomes a metaphor for so much else [and] it has a huge breath of interest for artists.”

Adam Beebee, "Ultras"

This defined football as fertile ground for making connections between history and iconography, uniting form and context. And it’s likely no coincidence that the decade also featured the advent of Relational Aesthetics: as Nicholas Bourriaud wrote in the eponymous book of 1998, “Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. It is the critic’s task to study this activity in the present. …In order to invent more effective tools and more valid viewpoints, it behoves us to understand the changes nowadays occurring in the social arena, and grasp what has already changed and what is still changing.”

In some odd way, Borriaud goes a long way toward explaining things like David Seaman’s 96-era goalkeeper shirt or the original San Jose Clash logo. Essentially, this meant the nineties opened the doors on cultural symbiosis; allowing design, art, business, celebrity, and sport to exist not only simultaneously but become dependent on each other. The trope of football-as-life had actually come to life.

San Jose Clash, 1995-99. "Ooh aah Bourriaud?"

My next article will shift back to more formal identity analysis with a look at the brand development of the World Cup, but a future writeup will begin to explore the connection between artists and football in greater (and more current) detail.

They also indicate the extent to which UEFA – and their local organizing committees – have commissioned ever–more elaborate and expensive brand identities to define the European Football Championship since 1996.

Graphic design has an captivating relationship to the game of football, particularly with regard to professional club identities developed or redefined in the modern era. The United States, in particular, had a great many adventurous insignias created in the late sixties and seventies for its brand–new soccer teams; unshackled from the burden of history, tradition, and ethnic association. Teams such as the San Francisco Gales, New York Cosmos, or Atlanta Apollos adopted minimal identities clearly inspired by the style of modernist graphic artist Paul Rand – largely regarded as the father of modern corporate design. The adoption of this aesthetic showed an ambitious vision to lay lasting and professional foundations in North America. A patently patriotic and singular visual manifesto, here the ideals of American corporate mobility were cunningly applied to sport.

Of course, these homegrown design methods were actually German, Swiss, and Dutch in origin; and Paul Rand was actually Peretz Rosenbaum, son of immigrant Jews in Brooklyn.

Yet, such is design; so often maintaining an oxymoronic nature. Paradoxically, the most meticulous work is usually the simplest, and a successful solution can have most any ideology grafted onto it after the fact.

The 1960 logo (and 64, 68, 72, 76, 80, 84, 88, and 92)

From the same classic modernist era as Rand, the European Nations’ Cup was born in 1960. True to the time, a simple icon was created for the competition held in France, holding to the very definition of cool graphic minimalism. A rising wave of five lines in the national colors (two red, one white, two blue) over the confederation initials (a conjoined E/F following the same waveform) creates a fluttering flag symbolizing the international competition.

And symbolize it, it did. This exact same icon was used for every tournament through 1992 in Sweden – with only the colors modified to reflect the changing host country, with two digits added to indicate the competition year.

Not Mario Brothers, but still Italian

An intriguing exception was the 1980 European Championship in Italy, the second to be held in that country. While the officially recorded emblem was that same UEFA flag icon, the tournament organizers had developed a second: a flower with the familiar 32–panel “classic” football as its bloom, over the simple text EUROPA 80. While possibly looking like it belonged to a contemporary Atari video game,it did presage developments 12 years hence toward unique logos for each staging of the competition. At this point, the tournament did not yet enjoy the high profile it now possesses, and fan interest/financial support only hinted at the
marketing behemoth the Euros have now become.

Strangely, very little concrete information is actually available (publicly or otherwise) on the origins of European Championship identity prior to the 2004 tournament. Consultation with reference material, design historians, and UEFA Media Services all led nowhere – in fact, correspondence with UEFA acknowledged their media archives do not even attempt to record and save such data.

What follows, then, is an assessment of the tournament’s recent brand development, with the benefit of the limited source materials available.

Euro96 England

There's lots of rural charm in the country

This was the tournament where I first became aware of the European Championships, thanks to coverage on ESPN and family interest in the exploits of the Spanish national team. The tournament was entertaining, Spain’s shirts were “all-time” gorgeous, and inscribed on it all was the now famous Euro 96 logo.

Looking back, it was certainly an appropriate icon for the times, being an image that as easily could have served as cover art for a Blur single. Yet I recall having little idea what it was supposed to depict. It was clearly an abstract soccer ball, yes, but why was it drawn so strangely?

It was only well after the tournament that its representation became clear: an abstract football player, dribbling against a blue sky, under a yellow sun. Even now, it does seem a curious image given the extended period England went without hosting a major event, and all the possibilities for imagery therein.

Now, the typography beneath is far more successful, partly for existing before UEFA dropped its half–moon corporate wordmark into everything with which it was associated. The lettering is tight, smart, and simple while maintaining a playfulness through a mixed but harmonious selection of typefaces.

All the necessary information is there in just 18 characters: who, what, where, and when. Notably, this was the first tournament officially referred to with the “Euro” abbreviation. Different naming directions might have been explored – but what prevailed, thankfully, showed a predilection to the succinct.

A bit of cheese, not all that gouda

Euro2000 Belgium/Netherlands

Where Euro96 was available on ESPN, I remember watching Euro2000 via pirated signals at restaurants. Characteristically, it featured prolonged Spanish disappointment, but also the best match I’d witnessed to that point in my life: Spain 4–3 Yugoslavia. I thought Gaizka Mendieta was beyond incredible, and Fernando Morientes claimed my most-favored-player status from Raul (for a time).

The logo barely registered. Maybe I didn’t see it enough, or perhaps this just wasn’t an inclination I’d yet developed. Upon reflection, it is a very unsatisfactory emblem, doubly so as a representation for two paragons of creative design in Belgium and The Netherlands. The merging of the two countries’ flags is a solid enough conceptual foundation from which to draw, but the execution lacks anything truly aesthetically unique to the region, one rich with inspirational creativity – ranging widely from Victor Horta’s natural ornamentation to Theo van Doesburg’s stark essentialism.

The typography used is even worse. The half–moon UEFA mark appropriately reflects the sphere above, but a bland serif titling adds nothing to the mark. The use of the same character for 0 and O further makes the lettering heavy to the right side.

The presence of those four 0s normally might spark some creative handling of their juxtaposition, but in this instance it was a path un-pursued. All in all, a disappointing and ultimately forgettable image.

Brought to you by the letter F for "filters"

Euro2004 Portugal

The competition was wonderful, the stadiums spectacular, the atmosphere magnificent, the logo atrocious. Lord knows how many tones, gradients, filters, and blurs were employed to execute the “official” version of the mark. It’s interesting that now, most records have chosen to archive the “simplified” version produced for merchandise and printing purposes instead of the Photoshop bonanza.

Reference materials from the logo unveiling claim “passion” as the unifying design principle (thus justifying the heart shape), as if passion was an export unique to Portugal. The base concept of a heart drawn around a ball is weak alone; but unneeded additions, complications and blends further obscures whatever rationale that wasn’t actually there in the first place.

On the other hand, the typography is somewhat successful, and productively keeps with the theme such as it is. The “PORTUGAL” tag does appear an afterthought, once they realized nothing about the image indicated where the tournament was actually taking place. There are certainly problems with character kerning and the fluidity between glyphs in the title (rendered as if it were a handwritten script) but these concerns largely pale against the atrocity residing above it.

The hills were alive with the sound of Spaniards

Euro2008 Austria/Switzerland

A tournament, once more, that was widely televised in the United States. My brief residency in Italy the year prior had permitted travel around the continent, and for the first time I’d actually been to nearly every city and stadium in the competition. I particularly recall poking my head between the gates at Basel’s St Jakob-Park, or sneaking into the unguarded upper tier of Ernst-Happel-Stadion during an Austria Wien training session. Now, here they were hosting many of the biggest names in sport.

Of course, Spain’s triumph will be my primary remembrance through future years, but the logo is much more along the lines of what one might expect visually from the two countries.A single line curving around a ball, rendered in red (their common national color) and green, with the line beveled and spiked to represent the primary topographical feature for which the nations are known – the Alps. While the use of shine and gradient is often overdone, it’s subtle enough here to be effectual. The light reflection on the lower swoop even gives the feeling of a Alpine skier or bobsledder racing to the finish.

The style and implementation of type below is exactly what you’d envision representing the Swiss. Simple, unadorned, sans–serif. A change in line weight to set off segments of information, compact leading, and precise attention to detail are its hallmarks. Even the location identifier is subtly aligned to the inner edges of the second–outermost characters. Overall, though it possesses a bit more shine and polish than necessary, it’s still a winning result.

Seriously, they grow it there

Euro2012 Poland/Ukraine

This brings us to the recently revealed Euro2012 logo, the first such competition to be held in Eastern Europe. Co–hosted by Poland and the Ukraine (two countries one might not otherwise think of together) it’s sure to be the most publicized yet in the United States; while it’s more likely than not I’ll be watching from elsewhere, if not in person.

The European Championship is a genuine brand now, a mark of excellence and quality known around the world. The logo is more important than ever, but only as part of an overall brand identity carrying through every aspect of the tournament’s presentation. Colors, graphics, and typeface – the Euro brand is now a complete experience. Everything from the press packets, to the façade of the Olimpiysky’s VIP box (where the champion will receive the Delaunay Trophy) will have been designed along set identity guidelines.

Still, the logo is the most visible manifestation of the brand, and this one succeeds. Faced with the challenging task of creating an image common to countries not normally associated, wildlife and the decorative arts served as fertile inspiration. While still possessing a “made–for–television” appearance via the use of delicate color blends not reproducible in other applications, it remains more restrained than most. Simplified versions exist for other applications, of course. Blooms in the nations’ respective colors stem from a white and gold ball–plant, not wholly unlike the aforementioned unofficial Europa 80 mark. Figures illustrating celebrating players or cheering fans subtly jump from the petals of each.

The typography below might be its major triumph. The UEFA mark is set against the curve of the lower Ukrainian stem, and directly above the Euro “O”. The lettering is built around this central axis, fluidly joining the R to the O, and using a lighter weight face for the year matching the curves around the UEFA mark. Much like the previous tournament, the location identifier is tight and balanced in the same style as the rest, feeling considered and part of the overall scheme.

For all its obtuse bureaucracy, UEFA has still shown attentiveness to branding and design appropriate to its European focus – a virtue that FIFA, on the other hand, has clearly been unable to adopt. Though often too complex, the newer Champions’ League branding alongside an annually renewed finals’ identity are additional indicators of UEFA’s keen visual awareness.

Unfortunately, recent World Cups, with the possible exception of the 2002 tournament in Korea/Japan, have had grossly deficient identities wholly unsuited to the most prominent sporting event on the planet. The South Africa 2010 logo is just the most recent atrocity. While on one hand FIFA have shown a >predilection to contemporary arts, with initiatives to bring aboard global creatives for tournament poster designs,, hperhaps one day soon FIFA will give its crown jewel its deserved aesthetic attention.

(Thanks to UEFA, the SFV, and Clyde Araujo at Under Consideration for their assistance)