Angel City FC debuted their club crest and colors Wednesday morning, and while its primary element is no surprise, the design is full of small details. 

“We’re rooted in tradition and we’re standing on the shoulders of all of the trailblazers that came before us, and we’re soaring to greater heights,” said crest designer Amedea Tassinari, a Los Angeles native, as she explained the finer points of the design.

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Beyond the angel itself, the element that immediately stands out is the angled shield. Tassinari pointed out that this angle is precisely 22 degrees, representing both the team’s 2022 launch, and a 22-player roster. It also provides an instantly recognizable outline among NWSL crests, something that calls to mind The Simpsons creator Matt Groening saying that the key to character design is an instantly recognizable silhouette. 

The angel is full of subtle meaning, though. There are 12 feathers for the XI on the field plus one extra to represent the fans. The wing design was inspired by the red-tailed hawks that live in the mountains around Los Angeles and also resembles palm tree branches. The color gradient represents the shade of LA’s sunrises and sunsets. 

The colors — light grey, pink and black, or “armour,” “sol rosa,” and “asphalt” — were carefully selected, too. Armour is for preparation and dedication, sol rosa is for the sunset, and asphalt is for the streets that build the community. 

“We did a focus group with a bunch of our day-one supporter group members,” said Jennifer Pransky, ACFC’s head of content. The supporters all pointed at the sunset as a color they associate with Los Angeles. Pransky described the colors as running from the “concrete to the coast.”

“It’s this idea that there’s so many different areas of LA and they’re all super diverse and have such great variety. So everyone kind of walks their own piece of street, every single day, but at the end of every day, everyone looks west towards the sunset in the horizon, and that’s where we get unified,” said Pransky.

It wasn’t just about the imagery — ACFC is a business, and businesses take their brands seriously. The feelings that fans associate with crests and team branding can help make or break the club’s fan culture. 

“We needed to feel like this could sit within the zeitgeist of popular culture, not just soccer culture,” said Kayla Green, ACFC’s head of marketing. “This is something that even if you weren’t a soccer fan, you learn more about our team and our mission and what we’re all about and you’d want to rep us because of what we stand for and what we strive for as a team.” 

Angel City president Julie Uhrman also announced during a Clubhouse talk on Monday that they would be dividing the crest into 5,000 pieces and selling or giving away each piece as non-fungible tokens. Five hundred pieces were available for sale at nft.angelcity.com for $50 per piece, or free with a seat deposit, the price of which begins at $50. 

The fans who buy a piece of the crest now own a unique code representing their individual segment of it, which is hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. 

On the ACFC NFT sales website, the club acknowledged that the way NFTs are generated comes with an environmental impact, due to the energy requirements of computation. In the description of the NFT, the club wrote, “We are offsetting the carbon emissions tied to our NFTs by donating 1% of proceeds from any resale to Offsetra (a service that offers carbon offset credits, analyzes carbon footprints, and raises money for “high-impact, certified carbon reduction projects”) in perpetuity, regularly reevaluating our carbon footprint connected to our blockchain projects, and actively exploring Layer 2 solutions (ways to do more and faster blockchain transactions).” In their FAQ, the club also says that they will offset all Ethereum gas costs related to minting or transferring NFTs on their platform.

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Of course, there’s criticism for offset solutions too, with critics saying they do nothing to actually get carbon emitters to change their behaviors, instead allowing them to essentially buy their way out of negative press for contributing to climate change, and that they can dissuade businesses to research or invest in carbon-reducing actions that might be better long-term solutions. 

In the same Clubhouse talk, ACFC founding investor Alexis Ohanian said, “We wanted an interesting way for people to feel like they are owners of the club, to have a piece of that crest, which will be our icon or emblem.” 

Ohanian also mentioned that the club has “blown past every expectation for merch sales, for jersey sponsorships.” And now with the launch of the crest — which also comes with a giant merch drop, natch — it looks like ACFC is poised to make even more money, all before they’ve even publicly announced a single player. 

ACFC is accompanying the crest launch with a citywide marketing campaign, including wraps for subway cars, radio buys and digital advertising, not just locally, but in Germany, the UK and France, where ACFC says they already have fans. 

All together, the club’s movements in the sponsorship and marketing space speak to a new level of ambition for an NWSL club. Ambition does come with responsibility, and with an ownership group so dedicated to the club’s core values around social responsibility, ACFC certainly deserves, and likely invites, further scrutiny of their business.  

Today, we can let that scrutiny fall on a new entrant into the pantheon of NWSL crests — and of soccer crests overall. It’s a fairly bold design, and definitely a strong differentiator in the league. Even though we haven’t seen any kits yet, ACFC’s crest and colors should allow them to stand out right away. 

(Images: Angel City FC)