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.

Chris Good at The Atlantic:

Nike’s new ad, in keeping with that advertising tradition, is one of the highest-end pieces of commercial art you’ll see, considering the production from a bona fide filmmaker and the aggregate global appeal of all the multi-national stars on screen. Its airing will be an oddly tailored event of art, commerce and sport.

Or is it bloated, macho cliche in comparison to Puma’s own video?

Jennifer Doyle at From A Left Wing:

Contrast the above (and its soundtrack) with Nike’s bloated ad, which is seasoned with the most tired forms of machismo and sexism. Here there are even a few girls and women, presented not as sex objects or football failures, but as fans and players (asking the boys to give her the ball!). This ad, furthermore, is actually about African soccer.

Both videos are, obviously, impressive productions. And perhaps the biggest irony of all is that neither Nike nor Puma are official FIFA World Cup sponsors: you’ll notice if you watch both videos again that there is no mention of the World Cup itself. But we don’t need that: such is the global fever for the World Cup, we effortlessly read into these videos the event itself, without either company having to shell out millions to sponsor it (of course, they have both shelled out millions to sponsor the teams and players featured).

Indeed, Jim Edwards at BNET raises this as an interesting problem for the events themselves:

It’s yet more proof that marketers can “own” even the world’s biggest sporting event without paying a red cent in contract fees — if you’re clever enough.

This is a significant problem for sports sponsorship: NBC vastly overpaid to broadcast the Olympics and lost money when advertisers didn’t show up. Sure, the recession didn’t help. But it’s also to do with the fact that venues such as Youtube, where the Nike ad is already approaching 1 million views, offer massive audiences for zero money. Why bother paying for an official slot when an unofficial effort is so much more efficient?

Interestingly, one of Adidas’ World Cup videos — which is much more along the lines of Puma’s effort than Nike’s, but has received far less attention — also does not mention the event itself. And its relaxed insouciance, especially given the hype we cannot avoid elsewhere surrounding the event, might actually make it my favourite.

Update: A reader has made the important correction to me that the Adidas video above was actually made on spec by director Igor Martinovic, and is not an official Adidas video.  Shame, for Adidas, though I guess that’s some damn cheap good publicity they have….

Statue of Ronaldo, Nike World Headquarters, Beaverton, Oregon.

Photo credit: ohhh_yeah808 on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Big Story
In London today, USL founder and president emeritus Francisco Marcos and USL chief executive Alec Papadakis were scheduled to be hobknobbing at the prestigious Leaders in Football conference, “the world’s most exclusive football business event where 1,000 senior executives linked to International Clubs, Leagues, Federations and Brands come together to learn, network and do business.”

Let us hope Marcos and Papadakis are doing a lot of the learning part, as back in the US, the league they run is falling apart as if it were American soccer in the twentieth century. This is a shame, because much of what USL has achieved over the past two decades has been pretty impressive: a structure containing, in 2009, well over 100 professional and amateur clubs critical for the development of American soccer.

But since Papadakis’ Atlanta-based Nu-Rock Holdings controversially purchased USL earlier this summer from Nike, USL’s poor relations with their top flight ownership has come to the fore as we’ve noted here many times, with a number of USL-1 clubs still threatening to break-away. An emergency meeting in New York City this week called by the US Soccer Federation seems to have stabilized tensions for now.

Forgotten in the byzantine details is one simple fact: USL-1 remains the only league in the world where the team owners do not control the league. This is why when the league seems unable to even properly schedule and market its USL-1 Championship final — Away from the Numbers reports that “the date and time of the Championship final second leg remains something of a mystery” — it becomes clearer why some owners believe an overhaul is needed to professionalize and market its elite division.

Worldwide News

• It’s amazing people are taking Jack Warner’s criticisms of England’s World Cup bids seriously. The man is hardly known as an objective and fair-minded observer of such processes without interests of his own, is he?
• Alex Ferguson’s big mouth gets a  bashing, as the media complains about getting distracted by his barbs.
• Strange question marks hang over Kenya’s Football Association, accused of planning to throw their World Cup qualifier against Tunisia this week.
• England’s World Cup qualifier to be shown exclusively on Ceefax! More seriously, the debate over England’s game only appearing on the internet goes on, with many complaining it “won’t be shown down the pub with my mates.”  The debate is curious — do people really think that the near future of football won’t be HD broadcasts, but will be internet streams?  Surely this mess has more to do with Setanta’s collapse than any technological transformation. Of course, as Paul Doyle points out in the Guardian, at least the fuss is over the broadcast of the game and not the state of the England team, given the match is a dead rubber now anyway.
• Avram Grant’s return to Portsmouth as Director of Football is seen as simply a step towards the ousting of manager Paul Hart, and Grant’s appointment as manager.
• Happy birthday to my Chicago Fire!  Peter Wilt’s reminiscence of October 8, 1997 here yesterday was a nice touch.  The club has a lot of problems that frustrate me immensely as a supporter, but without its existence I wouldn’t even have met my wife or had many a great time with friends following the team across the country, so I’ll be toasting to it tonight. I hope to see those of you in Chicago out at Toyota Park to celebrate this evening.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Tomorrow is the Chicago Fire’s birthday, and to mark the occasion the team and Section 8 Chicago, the Independent Supporters’ Association, are co-hosting a birthday party at Toyota Park.  Major League Soccer’s first venture into expansion (along with its dead fraternal twin Miami) turns 12 on the 138th anniversary of the great conflagration that made the city, the Great Chicago Fire.

As some of you have heard, the powers that be at Philip Knight’s Portland based world empire Nike had (unbeknown to me.  . .and the Fire’s owner, AEG’s Phil Anschutz) already named the team the Chicago Rhythm when I was hired as the team’s first employee in June of 1997.  Nike had named and designed logos for its other sponsored MLS teams: San Jose Clash, Tampa Bay Mutiny, Dallas Burn, New York/New Jersey MetroStars and the lone surviving name, Los Angeles Galaxy.

We were quite surprised when we began our name search to find that the good folks at Swoop Central had not only named us, but had also created our logo and colors.  One of my biggest regrets from my Fire years is that I misplaced the only tangible proof I’ve seen of their vision — a 2″ embroidered patch with the words “Chicago” and “Rhythm” circling a neon yellow coiled, tongue spitting cobra on an optic blue field.

To the joy and relief of many, we avoided a lifetime of misspelled team references, bad Catholic birth control method jokes and just plain poor branding when at my urging Phil Anschutz intervened at the highest levels to Nike and told his counterpart Phil Knight that it was his team and he was going to name it whatever he wanted, but it sure as sheep sh*t wasn’t going to be “Rhythm”.  OK, he probably didn’t say “sheep sh*t”, but he wasn’t happy.

“Chicago MLS”, as we were known prior to October 8, 1997, was headquartered in a series of suites in the Equitable Building on prestigious Michigan Avenue, downtown Chicago.  We started with a single suite for the original three employees — Allison Holmstrom (now Gregory), who was my executive assistant and absolutely the most valuable employee during the team’s first year, Denis Hamlett (then scout and community relations representative, now Head Coach) and me.   Every time we added three more staff, we added a suite until we reached critical mass soon after the team name announcement and relocated to the much loved loft space in River North.  The exposed brick and timber offices provided a great working atmosphere and were conveniently located between the Chicago’s greatest Italian joint, Club Lago, and Chicago’s best Irish pub, The Brehon.

While we hammered away with Nike on the name issue, we were prevented from holding any sort of public name contest, so instead we bought a list of names (who knew such a thing existed) and brainstormed internally.  The list included the usual Chicago suspects, many of which popped up again during the WPS’ Chicago Red Stars public name the team contest last year:  Blues, Wind, Mob. . . .and Fire.

I don’t recall there being significant internal debate, as most of us preferred Fire.  The three concerns we had were potential connections to the failed World Football League team of the same name, connection to a disaster, and conflicts with the city’s Fire Department.  We actually held an advance meeting (where we swore them to silence) with Chicago Fire Department officials to make certain they would be supportive of the team and name.

While short-staffed from July through September of 1997, we outsourced much of the PR and marketing functions to Aaron Cushman, Cardenas-Fernandez and the MLS office.  It was Cushman that came up with the idea to send out misleading invitations to the team’s launch event at Navy Pier.  The invitations, which were sent to media, potential sponsors, soccer and community leaders, featured a pen drawing of the Blues Brothers and led many people to assume we were going to be called the Chicago Blues.

My memories of the announcement day are fading, but I recall my nervousness while walking down Illinois Street from our offices to Navy Pier with our staff who I barely knew at this point.  Up until that day, I was on a VERY short leash held by the powers that be in Colorado — Phil Anschutz and his right hand man on his sports and real estate projects, Bob Sanderman.  They had a bad experience with their first general manager with the Colorado Rapids and had expressed concern with my young age (37) prior to my hiring.  Their daily phone calls and close attention to our operation was both helpful and a little nerve wracking for me through the first few months: though that was about to change beginning on October 8, 1997.

I remember (probably more from the video that I’ve seen dozens of times) making the announcement “Ladies and gentleman, CHICAGO FIRE!” followed by a large banner dropping to reveal the logo and showers of pyrotechnics framing the Fire’s now recognizable maltese cross.  Loud applause and cheering faded and we went inside Navy Pier’s historic Grand Ballroom for a celebration that lasted the rest of the day.

We didn’t make a night of it, though, as it had been a very long week already preparing for the announcement and we knew the real work began the next day when season tickets went on sale.  We had full page ads placed in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times as well as heavy rotation on network and cable television.  We all came in early the next day hoping the phones would ring.  At 10:00 am central time on October 9th, our prayers were answered and the phones lit up like Foster Brooks on New Year’s Eve.  Everyone, including Denis, learned how to take a ticket order.

We quickly surpassed our sister team’s (the Colorado Rapids) season ticket numbers, which was our internal measuring stick, and eventually climbed to the top of MLS.  While nowhere near the Seattle or Toronto numbers, back in 1998, our 6,000+ season ticket base was turning heads.  Every sale we made took more pressure off of me and gave me more confidence to lead the team. On April 4, 1998, a crowd of 36,444 watched the Fire’s inaugural home game at Soldier Field.

I’ll always remember October 8, 1997 as the birth of my favorite soccer club, but I’ll also remember it as a day that I became comfortable with my abilities to lead a major league team.

Happy Birthday Chicago Fire, and here’s to many more!

Peter Wilt writes every Wednesday for Pitch Invasion. Follow him on Twitter @RedStarsCEO.