Digby

Yeah, I mean, a regular cliche of this board is that new brands take a long time. Seems unlikely that the decisions at the level of colors and fonts were still being picked less than a month ago for a new MLS team. And, again -- neither team is pulling from a well of originality on this one. (incidentally I'm digging into this MPLS City stuff and it's actually cool! 7-a-side youth leagues in a community-run club, different brands for different pieces of the city, it's like a concepts thread come to life.)

@Gothamite, if the backdrops of those squares are based on shirt color, Chicago ought to be changed, yes? (This is a correction that brings me no joy, maybe hold off til next year in the hopes that they sweep that whole thing under the lost-2020 rug.)

That's a much sharper kit than that cut-rate Minnesota United kit I posted earlier. That said, these guys have their regular brand, that fauxback brand (which was nice!), and now this hyper-modern youth team brand. That cheapens the cries of "we're getting ripped off" to me. Still not great on STL's part, you'd think they would have checked on these things, but in fairness they've been telegraphing interest in a pinkish red for quite a while.

I've been seeing that style left and right in social graphics. It's still bad, but we're not exactly pulling from the well of originality here. Also this is their home kit? Seriously?

What is MPLS City Futures? The colors part is pretty bad. But otherwise this is what happens when everyone decides that only three possible soccer team names are acceptable, plus just going for the safe uber-hip type treatment that's everywhere right now.

While that's true, I consider them a "City" team because no other New York sports team uses all three words in their own names. I said this in another MLS thread, but it was genius or coincidence or both that the corporate branding collided with the municipal identity.

Wait sorry to thread jack, but is this a commonly held opinion? I thought Cincy's USL look was awful, just that honkin' huge helvetica FC and the soccer ball crown missing an outline and bright vibrant color-clash everywhere.

I'm calling it "saturated salmon" which is also the name of my favorite Captain Beefheart tribute band

No I totally agree with you, Man City is the "City" there in my mind, whereas Leicester, Norwich, Coventry tend to get reduced to the place name instead. I haven't felt like NYCFC eliminates the place name the way MCFC does in common vernacular, despite the common ownership and comparable local-derby aesthetic. No offense to St. Louis but maybe they wouldn't feel a need to define themselves around the place name the way a New York team would.

I've wondered that with all the Citys in the league. Is NYCFC "City"? I think of them as NYC; "Pigeons" is great but doesn't seem to be much more than a meme. Orlando has pretty clearly leaned into the Lions thing as a short identifier. These guys could be a "City", maybe, can't see a better option. "Come on you Arches" doesn't quite work. The magenta and blue is kinda clunky too. STLCSC. Somewhere, a scorebug designer weeps.

Yet again, a generic name that's already used enough repeatedly in the league. This doesn't feel like the right path for MLS to take, to me. Made considerably worse by the specific fraughtness of STL's city/county dynamic. I do like how the logo is put together, though it feels like it will get dated quickly, and there's little to latch onto in terms of a brand. Interesting choice on the red, hopefully that plus a good jersey design will set them off from Chicago, Dallas and RSL.

https://awfulannouncing.com/nbc/wide-nbcuniversal-cuts-include-hardball-talk-college-basketball-talk-rsns.html NBC Sports is gutting their local stations and digital presence. pivot to video I kid, I don't care about the -Talk sites much. But this does point to a question I've had with RSNs for years, namely: who the heck is watching them when games aren't on? NBC Sports Boston has at least a half-dozen telecasts of men in suits sitting at desks and issuing sports takes, and I can't imagine why anyone watches them. Figures that those are sticking around but a bunch of their actual reporters are layoff victims, just in time for a Celtics playoff run too.

Stars is a nice throwback, Archers would be interesting and different in the pro sports landscape, and works on a couple of different levels. It's been a decade of MLS expansion trying to be Soccer Epcot and I'm over it.

I don’t think Stars held that same cachet that say the Cascadia NASL brands did, and frankly this seems to me more like fun synchronicity than clever hint... but still I hope this is true. It would be a breath of fresh air at this point. the fact that we have to debate which ethnic group is the one a St Louis team ought to draw inspiration from suggests that maybe a different path is needed in this city’s case.

They had two decades of history with this name when entering MLS, and also Anglophone Montreal is a thing that exists. To me those are both more important than imitating Ligue 1, if the goal is to make your team relevant to your target local market.

Impact is the same in both languages and they switch the city/nickname order based on language context, what else are they supposed to do?

....what?

Similar in that they're both sites that rely on serving a specific audience rather than the world at large, but other than that this is a false equivalence. Deadspin's worst habit was being finger-waggy and annoying; Clay Travis loudly proclaims coronavirus a hoax. On charging to comment... relax. Deadspin's thing since the early days was the comments section being exclusive and actually readable; how it's not riddled with your neighborhood's dumbest trolls, how it's a community unto itself. This is just the writers asking that community to fund them, not some kind of troll-filter scheme, and that really ought to be obvious. It's not about being "hypersensitive to criticism" because valid criticism never manifests in comments sections.

I think the beach is probably fine but going to the beachfront bar afterward is the bad idea. Also the Deadspin 2.0 story is that the real issue is that corporate scum pressuring their employees back into crappy unventilated offices for no reason is vastly more dangerous than individuals getting a quick hit of outdoor summer fun. This is a worthwhile thread derail.

I don't personally care about Magary, the big-dumb-bro-dad-but-enlightened shtick is irritating and I don't trust it, but somebody must like him enough to keep getting fiction book deals (that I won't read) and GQ profiles (which are fine). There's an entire community around those Jambaroo things that will throw them money. But there's a bunch of other people on that masthead! The Burneko and Roth genre of essays, I don't know, people eat that stuff up and it doesn't hinge on a ball being thrown last night. I can imagine Diana Moskovitz has plenty of actual malfeasance to uncover. Also a hell of a time to consider the decade-long McKenna vs the Skins feud. A time of racial justice protests, Dan Snyder getting dragged, and the blazingly obvious commerce-before-common-sense that is the very existence of pro sports right now, if anything that's the perfect environment for Actual Deadspin to exist in for its audience. Also anytime Deadspin and Culture Wars come up in the same breath I feel obligated to mention that they published the most prescient thing that's actually about the Culture Wars, all the way back in 2014 when we were all young and stupid and naive. https://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844

This is an argument against beat writing, not post-blog blogging. Deadspin's whole shtick was "without access" in the tagline and everything. Nobody has access to the bubbles! It's the time for the off-field story people to shine.

It's an opportunity for readers to essentially pay writers directly. They said as much in that NYT article. With the modern proliferation of easy subscription models I've been surprised we haven't seen more of it, other than the fact that most writers can't be trusted to figure out simple accounting software. If the writers just want to make a decent livable wage, probably bolstered by the prestige freelancing some of them do, it shouldn't be hard to hit those numbers without hedge-fund leeches and a fleet of useless cubicle managers. People keep thinking the demise of Deadspin/Gawker-at-large was some moral comeuppance for their SJW nature or whatever, which is weird because the story played out in public. It started with that bizarro Hulk Hogan case, and ended with its own new empty suit sabotaging the site, with a series of corporate transactions in between that were always designed to strip-mine its assets.

70/year for the lower plan if you just want to read, which is fine. I'm sure it'll have the usual annoying bits about Deadspin but that's alright, still a net positive I think. I'll pay extra if they fire Billy Haisley. God I wish I had a job like this. Can you imagine what the media landscape would look like if everyone did this? Probably better.

I really like the idea of using red/blue/yellow again but making yellow the dominant color. Might be tricky to pull off, but it's like that briefly-lived RSL away kit that was better than their usual teamwear boring white ones.

God I cannot believe AC St. Louis was a full decade ago. I was under the impression that the green on those teams was just a coincidence, the classic idea of picking your team’s color scheme because it looks nice. Probably won’t fly in current MLS... the copywriter union will throw a fit. I like that the current one did green plus blue more like that brief Arsenal away kit that’s always been a favorite, and less like the Sounders.