ReBrand: Clyde FC

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Clyde Football Club was established in 1877. The club’s first home ground was called Barrowfield Park, located near the Glasgow district of Bridgeton, on the northern bank of the River Clyde, from which the club took its name.

In 1891, Clyde joined the Scottish Football League and their first league match resulted in a dominant 10-3 victory over Vale of Leven. By 1898, the club had outgrown their home at Barrowfield and relocated to Shawfield in Rutherglen, where they would compete until 1986.

During the first half of the twentieth century, this modest club, nicknamed ‘the Bully Wee’, had become a formidable side within Scottish football. Clyde won the final of the Scottish Cup three occasions (1938/39, 1954/55 and 1957/58) in six appearances.

By the late 1960s, many urban areas in Glasgow were being cleared for new developments. Large swathes of the population in these areas were forced to relocate to more remote regions of the city. A significant number of Clyde’s supporters resided in Bridgeton, Dalmarnock, the Gorbals, Oatlands and Rutherglen, all of which experienced significant population reduction during this period. Clyde’s support dwindled and the club has bounced around the lower divisions ever since their last spell in the top tier, which ended in 1975.

In addition to bouncing around the lower tiers of Scottish football, Clyde has moved their home several times since leaving Shawfield in 1986. And although they are now based in Cumbernauld (where they have played since the middle of the 1994/95 season and some nine miles north of the River Clyde as the crow flies), they retain their original name.

At the end of the 2018/19 season, Clyde finished second in the League Two (the bottom tier of the Scottish Professional Football League) table, qualifying them for the League One play-offs alongside third-placed Edinburgh City and fourth-placed Annan Athletic. In the play-off semi-final, Stenhousemuir, who finished second-bottom in League One, were drawn against Annan, while Clyde faced Edinburgh City. After dispatching Edinburgh City with a 4-0 aggregate score over two legs, Clyde faced Annan in the two-leg play-off final. Annan came out ahead in the first leg with a 1-0 victory over Clyde, but the Bully Wee made up the difference with their 2-0 victory in the second leg, securing their promotion from the bottom tier.

To celebrate their centenary in 1977, a version of the current Clyde badge came into regular use, though some version of it may have appeared as early as 1934. This badge features a ship in full sail encircled by a floral wreath. My redesign is an update of this badge. To commemorate their three Scottish Cup victories, I have included three sails for each of the ship’s three masts.

The redesigned home kit is inspired in part by the 2012/13 home kit. For the away kit, I decided to go with an all-red number (used as the third kit colour scheme as recently as the 2019/20 season), a reference to the left-wing political movement known as ‘Red Clydeside’, a major figure of which, James Maxton, served as an MP for the Bridgeton district for more than two decades.

As ever, I am indebted to Dave at Historical Football Kits for some of the historical information used above.

ReBrand: Greenock Morton FC

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Greenock Morton Football Club was established as Morton Football Club in 1874, making them the sixth oldest football club in Scotland. The precise origin of the name ‘Morton’ is unclear, though it may have been taken from ‘Morton Terrace’, a row of houses where some of the players stayed beside of the club’s original playing field.

Following the formation of the Scottish Football League in 1890, the original Second Division was formed in 1893, with Morton as one of the founding members. In the 1899/1900 season, Morton finished second, one point behind Partick Thistle. The following season, both clubs were admitted into the top tier, with Thistle finishing last and Morton coming in fourth with 21 points, behind Hibernian (25), Celtic (29) and Rangers (35).

Over the coming decade, Morton would remain in the bottom half of the table, but in the 1910s, the club began to show more promise. In the 1913/14 and 1914/15 seasons, Morton came in fourth, and by 1915/16, they finished third. Morton’s finest top tier performance came in the 1916/17 season, when the club finished in the second spot. Four years later, the club’s highest honour came when they won the 1921/22 Scottish Cup with a 1-0 victory over Rangers at Hampden Park.

In the 1926/27 season, Morton finished second-bottom and, alongside last place Dundee United, returned to the second tier for the first time since the 1899/1900 season. Over the coming decades, Morton would experience more promotions (10) and relegations (10) to and from the top tier than any other side in Scottish football, with their most recent spell in top flight football ending with relegation at the end of the 1987/88 season.

The current badge, derived from the Greenock coat of arms, is strong and some variation of it has been used since 1978. Before this, from 1964, a simpler badge, bearing the club’s name and three stars, was used on occasion.

In reworking such a strong badge, I did not want to design something that would appear too similar to other badges. I considered the other clubs which feature a ship in full sail on their badge: Stranraer, formed in 1870 and one of the oldest clubs in Scotland, and Clyde, formed in 1877. The ship on Stranraer’s badge was adopted in 1961, while the ship on Clyde’s badge, from what I can tell, came into being in the mid-1930s. If I wanted to defer either to the age of the club or longevity of the use of a ship in a club’s badge, Stranraer and Clyde, respectively, beat out Morton. The shipbuilding industry is tied very closely to Clyde’s name and it is possible that the presence of a ship on their badge predates the next earliest badge design by more than two decades, so I have gone with a ship in that redesign. It is possible that I have overthought this.

For Morton, I considered using the Free French Memorial on Lyle Hill in Greenock (which honours the fallen sailors of Free French Naval Forces who were based at Greenock from 1940 to 1945), or the James Watt Dock Crane (named after the 19th-century Greenock-born inventor). Ultimately, I departed from local symbolism entirely and adopted the main colours of the current Morton badge to form a modern ‘GM’ monogram (round so as to suggest a football).

For the home shirt, I went with the traditional blue and white hoops, which have featured on the vast majority of Morton’s home shirts from their earliest days (an aborted departure from which caused great unrest among Morton supporters in 2016). For the away shirt, the body is yellow (used commonly among many Morton away strips), with a seafoam green for the collar and sleeves.