For decades, the crest has been the most sacred emblem for football clubs, a shorthand for heritage, tradition and allegiance. As the guardian of a club’s history, it has long carried the weight of identity on its shoulders.
Now, a growing number of clubs are asking typography to share that emotional load.
No longer treated as a supporting act, custom type is becoming an everyday badge of belonging, a visual language that fans read, wear and share.
From Europe to the UK and the US, bespoke typefaces are being used to amplify heritage while keeping pace with how clubs communicate today.
They help identities work harder across an expanding range of touchpoints, from scarves to stadium screens, and help teams speak locally and globally at once – familiar to a neighbourhood, legible across a broadcast feed.
That dual power – functional and cultural – is what’s making custom type one of football’s most valuable new assets.
Gretel’s identity and custom typeface for New York City FC
When Gretel began reimagining New York City FC’s identity, the team started to think of type as a part of a larger system that could hold memory, place, and pride.
“Typography carries a club’s voice and narrative across every touchpoint. It creates hierarchy, establishes rhythm, and allows you to speak loudly or quietly, depending on what the moment requires,” says Dylan Mulvaney, Gretel’s head of design.
“Where the badge or the crest says, ‘This is us,’ type says, ‘This is how we sound.’”
In collaboration with Frere-Jones Type, Gretel set out to create a custom typeface that could “only belong to this club, in this city,” adds Mulvaney.
To do so, the team had to tap into a cultural touchstone that felt unmistakably New York. They found it in the iconic pre-modernist signage used across the Independent Subway System (IND), which has connected New York City’s five boroughs since its construction in 1932.
Gretel’s custom typeface for New York City FC
“The subway makes the five boroughs function as one city – connecting college students in Manhattan with grandparents in Queens, artists in Brooklyn with families in the Bronx. The club does similar work, creating bonds across all those differences,” says Mulvaney.
The result is the typeface NYCFC, available in two styles, Local and Express, that mirror two lettering approaches from the IND system and reflect the city’s contrasting scale – Manhattan’s towers against the lower buildings of the outer boroughs.
Local was designed by Nina Stössinger, while Express was drawn by Tobias Frere-Jones, a decision that mirrored the way New York’s subway lettering was originally made by different hands and helped retain a touch of dissonance and character between the two styles.
The lettering within the badge was also redrawn by Stössinger, based on the voice and cut of NYCFC, connecting the crest and the custom typeface.
New York City FC’s updated badge with the redrawn letterforms
“The connection matters because it signals intentionality,” says Mulvaney. “It tells supporters this isn’t piecemeal evolution. Everything is in dialogue, reinforcing the same core idea about where this club comes from and what it stands for.”
As Mulvaney points out, NYCFC now gives the club ownership in a way retail fonts never could.
“When you give fans letterforms that genuinely reflect their city’s visual DNA, rather than something licensed from a foundry that 20 other brands might use, it feels like their own,” he says.
That emotional power was something ModestWorks and Moniker were thinking about when developing the identity for Dallas Trinity FC. Together, they built a brand world that established a dialogue between the club’s crest and its pair of custom typefaces.
For a new club without deep-rooted iconography, this relationship allowed typography to share the brand’s symbolic weight and keep the crest from working alone.
ModestWorks and Moniker’s crest and custom typeface for Dallas Trinity FC
“Relying only on the crest can create fatigue. We needed something else that could carry the brand’s DNA without always leaning on the emblem or even the name of the club,” says Robert Milam, founder of ModestWorks.
“That’s where the custom typefaces come in. They create a larger system, giving us a distinctive voice that can flex across platforms.”
Like Gretel, ModestWorks and Moniker turned to a local cultural reference to ground the work.
The two typefaces they designed – Trinity Sans and Trinity Flare – were based on the typographic forms etched in the monuments in Fair Park, a National Historic Landmark in Dallas and home to the Cotton Bowl stadium, where the team would play its inaugural season.
“We studied the geometry and rhythm of the carved letterforms across Fair Park – the tall verticals, flared serifs, and compressed horizontals. Trinity Flare draws directly from those chiselled flares, giving the type an architectural presence,” says Milam.
The teams took notes from the typographic forms found in Fair Park
“Trinity Sans distils the monumentality into a cleaner, modern structure, with strong verticals and horizontals that echo the inscriptions.”
Together, the two typefaces carry a sense of gravitas and permanence – qualities that feel fitting for a young club that has launched with momentum.
For both teams, it was important to get the typefaces just right.
As the most constant part of the system that shows up in every single point of communication, type is ever visible. “A crest appears in certain moments, but the type is everywhere, every day. That ubiquity makes it a direct bridge to the fan base,” says Milam.
That constant presence gives it emotional power. Type becomes the connective tissue of a club; a tool that translates collective pride and belonging into visual form.
“Type is language – the words matter more than the letterforms themselves. But when those words connect to something meaningful in a club’s culture – like ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ for Liverpool, or ‘Play Like a Champion Today’ at Notre Dame – type becomes just as powerful as the crest in shaping identity.”
ModestWorks and Moniker’s custom typeface for Dallas Trinity FC
In a rapidly evolving world, where a club’s identity has to perform across LED boards, TikToks, jerseys and apps, custom type has become the more agile player in the brand toolkit.
Unlike a crest – bound by history and emotion – typography can evolve more freely, carrying the flexibility modern clubs need.
FC Basel 1893’s custom variable typeface, crafted by designer Sylvan Lanz, was built with this sense of fluidity in mind. Each of its six styles, featuring circular edges and sharp angles, is designed to evolve with the club – a new cut introduced each season.
“Each version becomes a visual artefact of a specific season – something that evokes memories and emotions for fans. For example, the ‘Circular Squared’ cut used in 2023/24 is now tied to the season they almost got relegated, their worst in years,” says Lanz.
1893, a variable typeface designed for FC Basel 1893 by Sylvan Lanz
“Friends joked that my typeface brought bad luck. The ‘Angular Circular’ version used the following season, 2024/25, became associated with winning the double – league and cup – and the return of Xherdan Shaqiri.”
When designing the typeface, titled 1893, Lanz immersed himself in FC Basel’s visual history and the city’s own typographic legacy, studying historic back numbers, condensed letterforms from the Basel School of Design, and archival materials to create a system that bridges the club’s past with its present.
There was also the pressure of winning over the club’s devoted fans. It’s a challenge Lanz met head-on – and one that paid off – with supporters quickly embracing the typeface as their own.
1893, a variable typeface designed for FC Basel 1893 by Sylvan Lanz
“I often see kids redrawing the letters for signs, and fans making flags or stickers. The fan block even used it in a stadium choreography – a coordinated visual display during a match – a huge honour, since they usually reject official club visuals besides the crest and colours,” says Lanz.
“There are also fun moments – cheap counterfeits, amateur clubs using it without permission, or spotting it in design schools from other cities whose students probably support rival clubs.
“I even received one hate message, to which I replied, ‘Nobody is forcing you to buy the jersey.’ He agreed and wished me a nice weekend.
That shows just how emotionally charged this context is.”
1893, a variable typeface designed for FC Basel 1893 by Sylvan Lanz
A club’s typeface, then, isn’t just functional. It gathers meaning over time, its emotional charge deepening with every season fans spend with it.
The emotional resonance of a legacy typeface is something Nomad had to carefully consider when evolving Tottenham Hotspur’s identity and remastering its custom typeface, which was first drawn nearly 20 years ago.
“The typeface felt ‘of a moment in time’ but it was also instantly recognisable as being Tottenham Hotspur – something very few football clubs have within their design toolkit,” says co-founder Terry Stephens.
“On the surface, we didn’t want it to look different, but we all needed it to work much harder for them – both in the sheer volume of platforms and displays that a modern football brand shows up in, but also in terms of what role it could play within the identity system.”
Nomad’s remastered typeface for Tottenham Hotspur
To evolve the typeface, the team studied the club’s fiery, high-intensity style of play. In response, they stretched and compressed the original typeface to mimic the way heat might warp its form.
“Surprisingly, even when stretched by 300%, it still looked good. It accentuated the serifs and made it look more contemporary,” says Stephens.
Once the concept was sealed, Nomad turned to F37 Foundry to build on it and master a fully variable headline font and supporting text version.
The remastered typeface strengthens the system, giving the brand new range while supporting the refreshed cockerel icon and revived monogram, and reducing their overuse.
Nomad’s remastered typeface for Tottenham Hotspur
“Over the summer, Tottenham toured Asia on their pre-season tour, and the graphics created for that relied far less on the crest, but still felt authentically Spurs,” says Stephens. “That’s a win for the type, and a win for the brand.”
As design tools continue to be democratised, custom type is set to play an even greater role in how clubs define themselves.
Crafting a typeface is now more accessible than ever, and its financial advantages over licensing off-the-shelf fonts are becoming increasingly clear, as is the growing recognition of type’s power to shape identity.
“Clubs are starting to see the importance of being a brand, a word still seen as ‘dirty’ in the football world, and that a brand is more than a logo or a badge,” says Stephens.
Nomad’s remastered typeface for Tottenham Hotspur
While custom type has firmly found its place within football clubs from across the world, Lanz says there’s still more to be done.
“I hope more clubs recognise the value of working with creatives – not just on type but across their entire visual appearance.
“Personally, I’d love to see leagues like the Premier League abandon the idea of one standardised typeface for all clubs. These generic back numbers erase a club’s individuality and identity,” he says.
“Each club should have the possibility to express its identity through typography – because in football, type isn’t just type; it’s charged with meaning, emotion, memory, and belonging.”
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