With the amount of clutter the average consumer faces, brands need an icon or image that can stand on its own. When it comes to football it’s usually less important as fans identify with their club on a more tribal level. But as mid-table or smaller clubs begin to succeed and get more exposure through continental competition, they find that they can suddenly reach a global audience. With this new potential global fanbase in waiting, the importance for iconic branding finally comes into play.

The focus of this project was Girondins de Bordeaux, a club in the south-west of France. Apart from their impressive 2008-09 campaign which led to a league title and domestic cup, Bordeaux have struggled to make much of an impact in the league in recent years. They have since been fighting for a chance to get back into a Champions League, having made a great run to the quarter finals back in 2009 but a few appearances in the Europa League gives them a stepping stone to rejoin Europe's elite, where as mentioned, a strong brand can benefit from global exposure.




In the past, Bordeaux had a good range of logos that would stand out against some of their competition even today. Somewhere in the 1990s however, a trend of minimalist text based logos rose in French football. Clubs like Paris Saint-Germain and Lyon abandoned their imagery for simple, stylized acronyms of their club names. In the case of those two clubs, they both reverted to more traditional football logos, featuring the icons that they had used in previous years; icons that represent their cities that could still be recognizable to the casual fan.