Brora Rangers Football Club was established in the village of Brora, Sutherland in 1879. In 1933, the club became members of the Scottish Football Association and in 1962, they began to compete in the Highland Football League.

The club’s first taste of silverware came in 1981, when they won the North of Scotland Cup (a competition open to northern clubs from the Scottish Football League and now the Scottish Professional Football League, the Highland League and the North Caledonian Football League). Just a season earlier, Brora Rangers first qualified for the Scottish Cup competition by winning the now-defunct Scottish Qualifying Cup (North), though they progressed no further than the second round, losing out to Highland League rivals Buckie Thistle in a replay at home.

Brora Rangers repeated their 1981 North of Scotland Cup victory a decade later, and then again, four times in five years between 2014 and 2018. Their recent dominance in the Highlands is evidenced further by winning the Highland League for two consecutive seasons, 2013/14 and 2014/15, as well as winning the Highland League Cup in 2016.

The club’s current badge is a play on their nickname, ‘the Cattachs’, a term relating to the ancient Pictish tribe of Cat (or Catt) that inhabited what would become Sutherland and Caithness (a Cattach is now a demonym for someone from Sutherland). In the badge, we find a white heraldic cat rampant. For the redesign, I did not wish to stray far from the current badge, as I find its broad red border very attractive. But I found the particular depiction of a cat rampant to be both confusing and somewhat innocuous. I decided to illustrate a close-up of a cat rampant head, which, I hope, suggests both a cat and the ‘rampant’ attitude of the club ready to ‘attack’. I also included the year of the club’s founding, being one of the older clubs in the Highland League, as well as the French motto of Clan Sutherland, Sans peur, ‘Without fear’.

For the home shirt redesign, I was inspired by the Milan-Europe shirt worn by Brora Rangers for the 1993/94 season. The black in both the home and away kits represents the Flow Country, vast expanses of peatland in Sutherland.