What is a badge in any case? It’s a complicated question to answer.
Perhaps your football club’s most ubiquitous symbol is a storied, heraldic design harking back to the local coat of arms or a sleek, modern design dreamt up to look effortlessly slick emblazoned on modern sportswear.
But why is there a tree? Or a bee? Or a devil?
This week, The Athletic is breaking down the details hiding in plain sight and explaining what makes your club badge.
Sheffield United’s club badge is fast approaching its 50th anniversary — and has endured more than most.
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That is particularly the case among United’s Yorkshire peers, with Leeds United having had umpteen changes since the start of the 1970s and their neighbours Wednesday launching a new design as recently as 2016.
United’s badge, a clear nod to the club’s roots, first appeared on team shirts in 1977. But it’s origins can be traced back to the early 1950s and former player Jimmy Hagan.
He is credited with the crossed swords — or blades (a nickname United shared with Wednesday in their early days) — below a white rose of Yorkshire design that today is synonymous with Sheffield United. There have been slight tweaks down the years, including the adoption of a crest rather than roundel.
But, apart from the club’s 125th anniversary season in 2014-15 when the very first badge from the 19th Century was reprised, United’s players have spent the past 45 years sporting the brainchild of a former captain who spent two decades at Bramall Lane.
“Jimmy Hagan’s version of the badge was used on a club tour in 1953,” says John Garrett, United’s club historian and supporters’ liaison officer. “But that was it, at least for a time. Don’t forget, these were the days when clubs usually didn’t wear a badge on their shirts.
“There were no big kit deals back then. If Sheffield United needed a new kit, they just used to visit Cole Brothers (Sheffield’s iconic department store). They’d go in and order 50 red and white shirts.
Jimmy Hagan’s design has endured to this day“Things only changed in the mid-1960s. The 1964-65 season was the first time United ever wore a shirt badge in the league. It was the Sheffield coat of arms, an emblem they had previously worn in the 1925 and 1936 FA Cup finals.
“It wasn’t until 1977-78 that the design we know today first appeared on the shirts and in the programme. The club had realised that to make money out of their own badge, they needed to copyright something.
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“Sheffield Council clearly wouldn’t let them copyright the city’s coat of arms so the crossed blades idea was revisited.”
Hagan’s design in the club colours of red, white and black is both simple and effective. There’s the two crossed swords to symbolise the city’s steel industry heritage. At one stage, 40 per cent of the steel produced in Europe came from Sheffield.
These sit below a Yorkshire Rose, the county’s symbol for centuries that is white as opposed to the red rose of Lancashire. Completing the design is a roundel containing both the club’s name and the year it was formed, 1889.
United’s badge can be found on all club correspondence, as well as the kits. It is as distinctive as the club headed notepaper from the 1930s (and possibly before) that featured two cricket balls and bats, a set of stumps and a football with two hands clasped together in greeting.
This was to reflect how Bramall Lane hosted both football and cricket, Yorkshire County Cricket Club first playing there in 1855. Sheffield United Cricket and Football Club remained in situ until the cricket section was given notice to quit in 1971. Yorkshire played their final County Championship game at the Lane two years later.
Hagan’s badge design has not just been confined to this country. When United bought a Chinese second tier club in 2006 as part of a wider scheme to create a portfolio of clubs around the world, the team was immediately rebranded ‘Chengdu Blades’.
The team colours were also switched to red and white and a new badge created, based very closely on United’s own design, including those familiar two crossed swords. The roundel was also retained, this time featuring the name ‘Chengdu Blades FC’ and ‘2006’, the year of United’s takeover.
That United should stick so closely to their own badge in the Far East spoke volumes, and underlined just what a good job Hagan, whose statue in the Bramall Lane car park was unveiled by his former Benfica player Eusebio in 2001, did when first putting pen to paper in the early Fifties.
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“Simple is always good,” adds club historian Garrett. “The design was quite modern, too, for the time. That has helped it to endure. There have been a few tweaks. Colours of the handles and so on. But it is still the original design that first appeared on the club’s Admiral shirts in 1977-78. Not every club can say that.
“It is a classic. Not least because the badge made it easier for kids to be a Blade at school, and that can never be a bad thing. All you had to do was draw a pair of knives on your exercise book and you were a Blade. A lot easier than drawing an Owl!”
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