Lower Pyramid Soccer/Football Redesigns - Halifax Town FC

[MDGP]

It's apparently been a full year since I've posted any concepts here, and I'm getting withdrawals. one of my favorite sports games is Football Manager, and I almost exclusively play Park to Premier style playthroughs in which a team from the very bottom of the pyramid is picked, and you try to get promoted all the way up to the Premier League and continental tournaments.

 

These playthroughs also have the added effect of exposing me to a lot of smaller teams and their terrible, terrible crests. Since the game is extremely moddable, I like to take it upon myself to update the crests for these teams. I've shown off a few of these in the past with my Oxford United and Wolves designs.

 

There's not going to really be any rhyme or reason to the designs other than they're smaller teams who's designs I wanted to update. I also realize that these teams, despite being small, have storied histories and passionate fans, and I want to design a logo that recognizes and respects these histories.

 

First up, the team I'm leading to glory, Banbury United!

 

Banbury is a semi-pro team founded in 1931 have existed almost exclusively in leagues you've never heard of, but in 2022 they made the climb to the Vanarama National League North. Their logo depicts what appears to be a lego minifigure dressed up like a puritan.

 

 

My update takes this general design and makes it look more human, giving the figure clear eyes, a nose, and a mouth as well as adding a mustache, because I'm from New England and every depiction of a puritan I've ever seen is John Carver, so you're stuck with it too. I did try to keep the general blocky style, but modernized the overall shape of the crest, with a new simplified banner and the hat extending beyond the bounds of the roundel.

 

 

The jerseys feature a double pinstripe hoop pattern that I've used in my playthrough, and features Nike as the kit manufacturer and Sophos as the jersey sponsor, two brands wildly above the stature of Banbury in real life, but I have them in the EFL Championship in FM, so they make sense in that regard.

 

 

[MDGP]

Boreham Wood FC is another club that has never played in the Football League, but recently gained moderate fame for its 2021-22 FA cup run, beating League One's AFC Wimbelon and the Championship's (at the time) Bournemouth, before losing to Everton.

 

Now, I generally hate when people describe logos as looking like a generic placeholder in a video game, but yeah, that's about as generic as it gets.

 

 

I decided to drastically change the logo and incorporate the local flair. Borehamwood is famous as the home of Elstree Studios, the filming locations of films including the Shining, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. The new crest depicts a classic film camera, with the film reels represented by soccer balls. The main focal point of the crest, BWFC is a modified Steel Tongs font, a font inspired by film poster credits.

 

 

The uniforms are kept simple, stark black and white. The main feature is the northwestern stripe on the cuffs and collars. Originally the idea was that the stripes would depict film reels, but the look was a too kitschy, so I simplified it into the northwestern stripe as seen here.

[MDGP]

Chesterfield is by far the most successful team I've done so far, historically spending much of their time in the third or fourth tiers of English football, the Spireites have recently cratered and now languish outside of the Football League.

 

The team's current crest depicts Chesterfield's famous twisted spire alongside their traditional CFC letter lockup.

 

 

My logo is a full modernization of the crest, darkening the blue to a navy, altering the spire to a more abstract depiction of the spire, changing the letter lockup to one that reads more like CFC than the current, and finally changing the shape of the crest to accentuate the tilt of the spire.

 

The striping pattern from the crest becomes the main focus of the jerseys. The clash kit takes inspiration from the Houston Astros' 1980-1993 shoulder stripes. The jersey manufacturer is puma and the sponsor is british sporting goods company Slazenger, so there are a lot of cats on this jersey.

[VampyrRabbit]

Unlike Boreham Wood and Banbury, I don't think the Chesterfield crest is an improvement over the original. It doesn't look like there is a representation of the Spire on the crest. I also don't think the striping on the kits work either with two of the three stripes being the same shade of orange. Maybe try using a shade between the crimson and the orange for the middle stripe.

[MDGP]

On 11/25/2023 at 6:54 PM, VampyrRabbit said:

Unlike Boreham Wood and Banbury, I don't think the Chesterfield crest is an improvement over the original. It doesn't look like there is a representation of the Spire on the crest. I also don't think the striping on the kits work either with two of the three stripes being the same shade of orange. Maybe try using a shade between the crimson and the orange for the middle stripe.

 

Thanks for the C+C, I see where you're coming from with both points. I'm gonna take a look at a few ideas and make some adjustments, though it'll probably come after the next few teams get posted.

[MDGP]

Halifax Town FC is one of the newer teams in professional football, founded in 2007 after the former team folded, and almost certainly takes the cake for one of the worst, most generic crests in sports, there's pretty much nothing interesting or unique about the design.

 

 

For my design I wanted to keep in line with Halifax's teams histories of simple crests. However, I still wanted to give the squad a design that doesn't look like it was designed in Microsoft word. The main design uses an HT letter lockup on a half navy, half light blue shield. Upon the top of a shield is a Yorkshire rose, because apparently every team from Yorkshire is legally required to have one.

 

 

The jerseys continue the half blue style, with the primary kit mimicking the style of the crest, while the clash kit utilizes the pattern on a center stripe and sleeve cuffs. Halifax is the city where the popular british candy Quality Street was created by Mackintosh's. Eventually the brand was sold to Nestlé, so it made sense as the sponsor for the squad.

[jbird669]

On 11/22/2023 at 1:24 PM, MDGP said:

Boreham Wood FC is another club that has never played in the Football League, but recently gained moderate fame for its 2021-22 FA cup run, beating League One's AFC Wimbelon and the Championship's (at the time) Bournemouth, before losing to Everton.

 

Now, I generally hate when people describe logos as looking like a generic placeholder in a video game, but yeah, that's about as generic as it gets.

 

 

I decided to drastically change the logo and incorporate the local flair. Borehamwood is famous as the home of Elstree Studios, the filming locations of films including the Shining, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. The new crest depicts a classic film camera, with the film reels represented by soccer balls. The main focal point of the crest, BWFC is a modified Steel Tongs font, a font inspired by film poster credits.

 

 

The uniforms are kept simple, stark black and white. The main feature is the northwestern stripe on the cuffs and collars. Originally the idea was that the stripes would depict film reels, but the look was a too kitschy, so I simplified it into the northwestern stripe as seen here.

 

Any logo that combines my love of film with soccer and two of my favorite franchises is going to be a winner! One suggestion, make the logo sepia (or close to it) and white - to give further homage to film history.