What is a badge in any case? It’s a complicated question to answer.

Perhaps your football club’s most ubiquitous symbol is a storied, heraldic design harking back to the local coat of arms or a sleek, modern design dreamt up to look effortlessly slick emblazoned on modern sportswear.

But why is there a tree? Or a bee? Or a devil?

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This week, The Athletic is breaking down the details hiding in plain sight and explaining what makes your club badge.

A version of this article was published in September 2020.

A football club’s badge is sacred property and anyone tampering with it does so at their peril. But what is it that makes a good crest?

Does it all come down to simplicity? Should a badge be innovative in style? Or are outlandish designs that catch the eye the way to go in an era when clubs think of themselves as international brands?

Leeds United stumbled into this minefield in 2018 when they tried, with crushing results, to change the crest on their shirt. The design, depicting the famous “Leeds Salute”, was released for public consumption at noon one Wednesday in January. By 6pm, they were bowing to an onslaught of criticism and abandoning the plan completely. In those six hours, more than 30,000 fans signed a petition calling for it to be scrapped.

The purpose of the scheme was, in theory, to make Leeds more marketable abroad. The club’s chairman, Andrea Radrizzani, thought the existing shield design — the crest at Elland Road for more than 20 years — was unsuitable for raising their profile further afield than the UK. The current badge has the initials “LUFC” down the middle of it. Radrizzani wanted a design with the words “Leeds United” specifically included. The implication was the shield was outdated, that Leeds needed more modern branding on their kit. But a car crash ensued.

A few weeks ago, the website JOE ranked every Premier League club badge from top to bottom and best to worst. It was, as the author conceded, a subjective article in parts but Leeds’ crest took first place, described as “the perfect combination of slick design and traditional elements”. Almost 25 years after it was first drawn up, it appears to have retained its shine. And after Leeds’ promotion to the Premier League, it might slowly shake its association with their long exile in the EFL.

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The story of how the shield design developed, and why it was seen as a good badge, goes back to Howard Wilkinson and the summer of 1996, when international football came to England. Euro ’96 was in full flow and the Italy squad were based in the north of England, playing two of their group games at Anfield and one at Old Trafford. Wilkinson admired them as a squad but aesthetically, he liked what they wore. When the players stepped off the team bus, the badge on their suits — a plain and simple shield with stripes in green, white and red — said “Italy”. No ambiguity and no fluff. Just instantly recognisable.

The same was true of the crests used by many Spanish and Italian teams. It got Wilkinson thinking. Did Leeds need a new crest? Their badge at the time was a circular design with the white rose of Yorkshire in it. If you followed the club, you knew what it was as soon as you saw it. But to Wilkinson, the badge was difficult for neutrals to pick out. From a certain distance, he thought it could be mistaken for Leicester City’s.

So he began sketching ideas and enlisted Dave Harrison, who worked for local firm Ensign Badges, to help mock up an alternative. The brief was not at all complicated and, from Wilkinson’s perspective, the plainer the better.

Ensign was already employed to supply cloth badges to the club shop. Supporters could buy them and take them home to sew onto clothing, bags or anything they wanted.

“The first call I got was out of the blue, asking me if I’d go down and have a chat with Howard,” Harrison tells The Athletic. “He didn’t like the Yorkshire Rose badge or he didn’t think it served the right purpose. He wanted something that was more of a logo, something more easily identifiable. To him, what they had didn’t work.

“He said to me ‘the cannon is Arsenal. The tick is Nike’. That’s what he was thinking. He wanted something that jumped out instantly. In that summer he’d see what the Italy squad were wearing and he wanted that kind of design, with no lettering or wording, something that would become synonymous with Leeds United. It was his idea. I honestly couldn’t tell if the club or the board knew he was going down this tangent.”

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Wilkinson had discussed a change with Leeds’ chairman Leslie Silver but the idea was his alone. “To my mind, the old badge was over-busy,” Wilkinson says. “It was only my opinion but that’s how I felt. I told the chairman that I thought we should modify it and bring it up to date. I saw badges in Italy and Spain that were much easier to identify. You knew straight away who you were looking at.

“It wasn’t exactly a Brain of Britain idea but I had an image in my head which I put down on paper and what you see now isn’t too far away from what I drew first time around. I wanted something much more recognisable, a badge with a bit of class about it.”

He and Harrison settled on a shield design and tossed a few more thoughts around. Harrison produced a drawing with three stars across the top, in keeping with the city of Leeds’ official crest, but Wilkinson told him it was “too Americanised”. A small Yorkshire Rose was added instead, but Wilkinson wanted another feature. The previous night, he and his wife Sam had shared a bottle of wine. The label on it featured a shield with chevron-like stripes. Wilkinson asked Harrison to mimic them.

“He phoned his wife and asked her if she’d thrown the bottle away,” Harrison says. “It was still there in the house so she soaked the label with water and posted it to me. That let me redraw the badge as you see it now, with the stripes on either side. Howard said, ‘Good. We’ll go with that’.”

It was not a big project. Harrison estimates that it took no more than a week to meet with Wilkinson and put the final sketches in place. Even then, he was not sure when or if the badge would be used by the club officially.

“Howard never told me what the plan was,” Harrison says. “I just turned up after getting the phone call. I didn’t have a clue if it was a club thing or just a badge for him.”

Wilkinson’s last season as manager at Elland Road was the 1996-97 Premier League season. He made it as far as September, when he was sacked after a 4-0 defeat to Manchester United. Before Leeds’ first game, he and his players took their places for the annual squad photo. The images show kits bearing the Yorkshire Rose emblem but on the left breast of Wilkinson’s blazer is the badge designed by Harrison.

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It was not until the 1998-99 season, though, that the shield crest was embraced by Peter Ridsdale and suddenly appeared on Leeds’ shirts. Harrison was not made aware of the change in advance and had not asked for any copyright. Overnight, the image concocted by him and Wilkinson became the club’s new crest.

“The simple fact is I never gave any thought to copyright,” Harrison says. “The badge they used (in 1998), someone had had the ‘LUFC’ initials down the middle. That went against what Howard wanted. He didn’t want any writing or lettering on it. He’d say to me ‘I don’t want you having to come up to my chest and screw up your eyes to see what it says. I wanted something you look at from a distance and straight away say “Leeds United”.’

“But to see the club using it was something I was massively proud of. I still am. I don’t make a song and dance about it and until recently, not many people knew I’d designed it. Changing the badge is a big decision for the club. I feel quite proud to have been part of that.”

Much of Ensign’s work came via the clothing store Flannels in Leeds. Clubs or associations would order a batch of suits and Ensign would be asked to produce badges to match. The company made crests for Aston Villa, Newcastle United, the Great Britain rugby league team and Sven-Goran Eriksson’s England squad ahead of the 2002 World Cup but the invitation from Wilkinson was the first time Harrison had been asked to create a new badge from scratch. David O’Leary was a fan of the design and commissioned Harrison to make ties for his squad. In 2001, Ensign produced around 40 badges for players and staff at Elland Road in anticipation of Leeds reaching the Champions League final. They were rendered redundant when the club lost to Valencia in the last four.

“The problem was the timescale,” Harrison says. “I had to put them into production before the semi-final was played because if I didn’t, they wouldn’t be ready for the players’ suits for the final. We made about 35 or 40 and I delivered them and got paid for them but they never got used. Where they went or where they are now, I couldn’t for the life of me tell you. No one seems to know. But I did two designs to go with whichever colour of suit they went for. It was all based on Howard’s original brief — no letting, no wording. Whichever colour you pick, dark blue or silver, the badge is still obviously Leeds United. It doesn’t matter.”

Leeds and Radrizzani have not entirely given up on the idea of a new crest. When their “Leeds Salute” emblem was released, the club said they had used the results of a poll of 10,000 supporters to finalise the design. In reality, the survey had failed to ask specific questions about whether the existing badge was outdated and what, if anything, it should be replaced with. Some likened the design to an image from the Pro Evolution Soccer console game. Twitter teased the club with photoshopped efforts until the badge was withdrawn.

United quelled the controversy by inviting supporters to submit designs of their own, which hundreds did. A poll to pick a winner was planned but is still to be staged. Having tweaked the shield slightly for their centenary season last year, Leeds are carrying their long-standing crest again this year. There are other priorities at Elland Road and other things to concentrate on, increasingly so as the impact of COVID-19 persists and intensifies. They have no fixed timescale for when the subject of a new badge might be revisited.

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Harrison accepts that change might come and that nothing lasts forever. Badges never do at Leeds, a club who have been through nine in their 100 years. “I’d be sad to see it go,” he says. “You know that someday it might disappear but it’s always nice to look at that crest and think ‘I had a hand in that’.”

Something about the crest he and Wilkinson conjured up was made to last.

(Top image design: Sam Richardson)