Really? CF Montreal? Chicago Fire FC? Houston Dynamo FC? Columbus Crew FC? Inter Miami CF? Nashville FC? FC Cincy? LAFC? Austin FC? And that's just the new ones. Expansions lined up -- Charlotte FC Sacramento Republic FC Stl City FC (despite the tantalizing opportunity for Louventus) On top of Atlanta United FC (redundant) NYC FC (redundant) Orlando City FC (redundant) Minnesota United FC (redundant) Toronto FC FC Dallas DC United Real Salt Lake Vancouver Whitecaps FC Seattle Sounders FC The last team they added that doesn't have a FC or such is the Timbers from 2011 I think it is a rote suggestion? requirement? for any team that frets about branding or comes in by expansion To me it's cardboard cutout Europhilia. There are plenty of European teams with unique names or mascots or mascot names. There are also plenty of European teams with god forbid a soccer ball in the team logo. And that is something that in parallel has been dropped from the league and team logos. Including ours. Not unlike the USMNT trading away their competitiveness to imitate European formations and tactics -- I think they used to talk sh*t about our tactics because they didn't like losing to us and needed some snobby reason to complain about it -- well, we have to give away our uniqueness to imitate some cardboard cutout of how they do soccer. Meanwhile the Sounders play on astroturf in a football stadium wearing dayglo green unis. The most successful team in the league is everything snobs have been taught to hate -- except for playing soccer. I think we are forever chasing their respect or the ticket sales of Europhile snobs, who probably could care less about "FC" -- though they will make fun of "Dynamo" if they need to tease us -- and who instead would really want to whine about payroll. That we should be plunking down money for Messi and other stars, like EPL and La Liga and B.1. Which ironically is an amped up version of the average Dynamo fan complaint, just completely naive about our economics and the NASL history lesson. And then claiming to be fan centric we respond to the teasing and payroll complaints by superficially and defensively adjusting the mascot name and ball logo and ignoring the complaints of casual and snob fan alike to spend money to run out a more competitive product.
It isn't really even "Europhilia" so much as "Anglophilia". Mainly it's a bunch of Americans that make a lot of noise about being "European" or doing things like the "rest of the world", but by "European" or "rest of the world" they mean England. That's how you get the hilarity that is USL Championship, USL League One, USL League Two. One of the biggest pluses about the proliferation of soccer available for watching in the U.S. to me is that maybe we finally can start breaking the stranglehold of the EPL by mixing in other leagues. Edit: Don't get me wrong. Nothing wrong with the EPL, which is entertaining, but as much as the average English soccer fan would love you to believe it there's an entire world of soccer outside of the EPL.
my thing is i watch some serie a and watched a whole season of b.1 a few years back, and i found those to be more tactically sound and defensively sharp leagues. i think england can afford expensive teams but i don't think they are better organized. if you look at the last 10-20 years of UCL winners, it's mostly spanish teams, italy was good first decade, germany last. two english winners in the past 10 years. but one of them has always gotten more TV. the others get prominent under one rights holder and then disappear under another. if your league is on BeIn or ESPN+ you disappear. i also think based on players like barnes that championship ball is lateral to MLS. plenty of merely slightly better than average MLS players have gone there and started. and i think the bottom handful of EPL is championship-plus which is why kamara could go play for norwich and not embarrass himself. heck, based on personal experience i questioned whether the back end of League ball is even better than NCAA. bunch of players on Fulham or Barnet I was like I am better than that. if you ever got rid of the work permit rules we could inundate the place. but instead of proving we never were that inferior -- we tied england in 2010 in the world cup -- it would be taken as proof of how big a deal england is. the hint at this is how many of our players can get jobs in germany, where they have roster limits as opposed to qualitative standards. i think some of the affinity is outside NY or StL where the coaching was more cosmopolitan and varied, the first wave of international coaching imports was heavily English -- and i mean before the foreign money and continental passing soccer came in. kinnear ball. 442 physical stuff. my first foreign coach was english and i can see his imprint. they of course would tout english tv soccer. i think the influences have broadened and the pendulum has swung against organization -- for good or ill. but you still have a bunch of english soccer fans. i probably watched more mexican soccer growing up -- available on rabbit ears without cable -- and it is just as available. but it's in spanish, they are the "enemy," and we aren't taught to play soccer that way. i respect it because i ran into their youth teams in dallas cup, and they were actually drilled to the nth degree. i would be curious what would happen if the theorized merger ever occurred, or if we keep going down the technical soccer road.
Some interesting thoughts below on the rebrand and merchandise. I was at the Galleria recently and was in one of the stores (maybe Lids) and they only had the "old" logo on the hats. Academy was the same way back around Xmas. Wondering if they sold so little merchandise this year that they have so much excess old stock to buy back so I did see some crazy low prices on old jerseys on MLS shop around Xmas so I think they tried to clear out the Fanatics/MLS shop stuff of the old logo stuff. It is growing on me a bit - some guy referred to it as liking it due to Stockholm Syndrome taking over https://www.reddit.com/r/dynamo/comments/lf67ag/my_complaint_about_the_dynamo_rebrand/
i don’t know if it’s still true, but back in the MLS 2.0 days I heard from the knitting circle that Adidas treated MLS like crap. More so if Beckham wasn’t on your team. my guess would be that it’s still partly true in 2021.
before i get going, IMO it's a crest and not a logo. the only symbol on the thing is the tiny lightning bolt. it's basically just lettering. repeating the name twice. i assume they had to repeat the initials as a full name to get FC in somehow and to spell out what the logo should already convey. mind you, it's a new crest but SF doesn't feel compelled to spell out San Francisco Giants below their similar script. it's a concession of not just the lack of awareness of the market of the new look but also that it doesn't carry much load by itself. nothing about it screams "ah, dynamo."
that being said, i think the "but it's not in stores" complaint comes from a particular political viewpoint. it is prominent on the website. we are in a pandemic. how many people are going out shopping. the old stock probably didn't move off the shelves much, but neither would they be moving a bunch of new stuff either. the implication is for financial reasons they are stuck with the old stuff out, but with few people shopping i don't know if i would load up physical stores with my stuff when few people are going out. my strategy would focus on online shopping. if i end up taking back stuff that doesn't sell why would i double that up by saturating the warehouse with a second set. mind you, maybe the tweener argument is you at least ship out a modest set of new stuff to just show the flag. but this is a pandemic and it would be idiotic to saturate the stores with new dynamo, maybe even buy back the old stuff, if it costs you money.
i think the argument also assumes a pure profit motive when as i have suggested before, they couldn't have possibly believed "FC" or the logo change were going to have dramatic effect, and this all may instead reflect a power play within a shuffled ownership. someone up high wanted FC and didn't like the old logo. someone up high got what they wanted. marketing may then be mild because the goal was a muscle flex and not flogging product. whether i have that right or not, the struggle of last season, the drawn out CBA discussions that threatened lockout, and the delayed season start may have encouraged a later rollout. lousy season, modest roster effort in the offseason, unclear what the union and pandemic stuff were going to result in. also bears noting that for a notoriously cheap team with old stuff still in pandemic hit stores they may simply not want to spend the money to swap it out. though i don't get releasing and moving forward with the branding at that particular time then. if you (financially) and the market (pandemic) are not really timed right to generate buzz, why force it? it's not like we're filing taxes and had to do it on the "15th." if you had all these factors going -- stores with piles of old things you don't want to buy back, lousy previous year, no intent to really work on it until this summer or next winter, pandemic weighting down merch sales, etc.........sit on it until you are going to actually try, sign people, pandemic eases up, better financial situation to change the merch on sale, etc. but even that unrelenting drive at all costs but little recompense suggests someone somewhere had a bug in their bonnet and didn't care if it moved shirts or when it happened.
The logo is starting to grow on me but I think they've monkeyed around with the jerseys too many times now. Yeah, I know they do some sort of new jersey every year or two but some of the ones from the early BHP era were better than some of the more recent ones. One reason why there always seem to be so many of the last few years' jerseys on sale at Dick's or Fanatics is that they never sell anywhere near as many now that the fans know the jersey changes every year. If you don't love it you aren't buying it.
What does surprise me is they didn't do a ball cap with just the interlocking letters. They are going way overboard with the hexagon stuff
I usually treat myself to a jersey every year. Just a fun thing for me, but I'll admit that the last two years before this were bad. I bought the Tigres knockoff, but I'm really not a fan. I completely passed on last year's black jersey because it is hideous. Did get this year's and really think it looks sharp. Agreed on the hexagon deal though. I'd get a cap with just the letters.
I just want our lone star back. Why that iconic Texas symbol was dropped I will never know. Make a new crest, fine, got it, re-brand cuz we have no other concepts to grow the club here in this market. Just leave the one symbol that is common to our city's most dominant sports team, who also are proud to be orange.
you bring up an interesting point which is they've gotten rid of all the graphics to the point of generic, in a sense. it's all lettering except the tiny bolt. maybe the reason they are so obsessed with the hexagon is to have something pictorial to hang their hat on.**** i say this because they also got rid of the soccer ball. setting aside my pet peeve that soccer balls are in many foreign soccer team logos -- we are again imitating a cardboard cutout of europe. it had occurred to me that in a sense "FC" should have been redundant because the little ball in the logo said that already. kind of like you're saying the star says "texas." so if crests are the extension of heraldry and historic shop signs where the symbols sought to convey something whether you were literate or not, our crest now conveys little other than the literal. the honduras "H." just as bad. ****a hexagon itself can be a soccer ball panel, is the logo such a clunker that elements that should have some meaning don't really get noticed? "we got rid of the soccer ball, but it's still there...."
in terms of the shirt, is this home game jersey https://www.mlsstore.com/houston-dy...ey/t-36568069+p-2613678522724+z-9-3228748475? not about the same as this training jersey https://torosteamstore.com/collections/puma/products/mens-puma-2021-training-jersey "but you can earn patches for ours"
And the match of craptastic rebrands continues with the biggest one yet. Columbus is dropping the "Crew" and sticking with plain ol' Columbus SC. It's already on their team apps so the transition has begun.
The crest is a downgrade for sure but the people crying about “dropping the crew name” is a bit overblown. The team still has the word “crew” all over their social media feeds. They are making it abundantly clear that “crew” is still their identity. People cancelling their tickets are going to be extremely disappointed to find that new stadium all filled up and their gesture meant nothing.
Read the below - I don’t think it’s the kind of thing to abandon the team over but they have a hardcore ORGANIC supporters group that helped save the team in Columbus. Not sure why they dropped the Crew name - at least the Gulf States Toyota marketing person that we hired knew enough not to drop “Dynamo”. Hell, at least it shows they care, most people probably have no idea the Dynamo did a rebrand to FC The Crew is no longer the Crew.Another rebrand, another example of owners — supposed “stewards” of a club — not appearing to listen to the people who give that club its meaning.Talked to fans about the changes, the future and a very dramatic meeting: https://t.co/QoWyFIuIaD pic.twitter.com/K5lvvGTKWx— Sam Stejskal (@samstejskal) May 11, 2021
https://sbisoccer.com/2021/05/columbus-crew-name-restored-after-columbus-sc-rebrand-is-scrapped and the organic movement stopped the rebrand
From Mark Berman Twitter---"MLS sources: New York businessman Ted Segal has reached an agreement to buy the Houston Dynamo FC and Houston Dash from controlling owner Gabriel Brener. Segal is the founder and president of New York City-based EJS Group, a real estate development and finance company."