Crest Chronicles

A club badge is supposed to be permanent — stitched onto shirts, cast into stadium gates, tattooed onto fans who never expected it to move. Most of the clubs in this archive have worn the same crest, in one form or another, since the day they were founded. A handful have not.

Every entry below is a genuine redesign, not a minor tweak — a club that walked out onto the pitch one season under a different badge than the one it wore the season before. Sorted chronologically, oldest first, each one marked with the year the change actually took effect.

Most rebrands here follow the same logic: a badge gets simplified for an era of shirt printing, television broadcast and small screens, and the ornate Victorian-era crest gives way to something flatter and more legible. A few — Arsenal dropping its scroll in 2002, Juventus reducing itself to a single monogram in 2017 — were deliberate breaks with a century of visual history, and were argued about by supporters for years afterward. The badge changes; the club, mostly, does not.