Europa League

[$teauA]

http://www.uefa.com/uefa/keytopics/kind=64...sid=754085.html

UEFA decided to rebrand the UEFA Cup starting next season. I really like the logo and the name change will definitely grow on me:

[-kj]

Grow like a fungus, I'd think. Ridiculously dumb name.

The logo's... well, it's the type of shiny logo you expect from UEFA.

[Gothamite]

How can the organization which brought us the amazing Champions League starball logo give us this mess?

I know that it's supposed to reference the trophy:

but unless you don't know that, it doesn't work at all.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

While the new logo is very nice, this change is silly for two reasons:

1. "Cup" is important to the name, since places in this tournament go the winners of the nations' domestic cups (in addition to places awarded by league position).

2. What language is this? "League" is English; while "Europa" is, well, not. It is the word for "Europe" in just about every continental European language. Even if UEFA wanted to remove "cup" from the competition's name, they could at least have fashioned a new name which sits entirely within the same language. (When the NFL Europe became NFL Europa, they did not face this problem; there was really no cross-language business, as "NFL" is still going to be "NFL" in any language.)

One might retort that "Europa League" will be the name everywhere; while, under my plan, the new name would have X number of forms --"Europe League", "La Liga de Europa", "La Lega dell'Europa", and so forth.

I would remind any such retorters that the current name already has many forms ("UEFA Cup", "Coppa UEFA", "Copa de la UEFA", "Taça UEFA", etc.). Furthermore, while it is certainly true that one single form of the new name will be universally used, it is unfortunately also true that this one single form will be universally gibberish.

Anyway, I suppose it could have been worse. At least the boys over at UEFA know that "league" is a noun -- quite unlike the tone-deaf creators of the ludicrously-named Major League Soccer, who evidently deemed "league" an adjective, no doubt on the faulty analogy with "Major League Baseball". (Sadly, this sort of erroneous usage, having been "legitimised" by MLS, has now spread: Paul Lukas today had an item about a team in a league called "Asia League Ice Hockey". Oy!)