Chelseas badge: Popular lions, unpopular lions and forgetting Ken Bates

What is a badge in any case? It’s a complicated question to answer.

Perhaps your football club’s most ubiquitous symbol is a storied, heraldic design harking back to the local coat of arms or a sleek, modern design dreamt up to look effortlessly slick emblazoned on modern sportswear.

But why is there a tree? Or a bee? Or a devil?

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This week, The Athletic is breaking down the details hiding in plain sight and explaining what makes your club badge.

Even by Chelsea’s standards, 2022 has seen an incredible amount of change.

Owner Roman Abramovich? Gone. Long-term senior figureheads Bruce Buck and Marina Granovskaia? Gone. Thomas Tuchel, the coach who led Chelsea to their second Champions League title? Gone, with Graham Potter taking his place.

The Todd Boehly-Clearlake consortium won the bidding process to buy the club from Abramovich back in May and have wasted no time in making their mark at the Premier League club.

There have been a lot of arrivals and departures on the playing side, too, as the record spend of £250million ($287.5m) in the summer window demonstrates. The owners have also quickly gone to work on making early improvements to Stamford Bridge. Such turmoil can always lead fans to wonder, “What’s next?”

One of the items on their agenda from the outset is to improve Chelsea’s marketing and commercial opportunities. That can always lead to concerns from fans about the prospect of rebranding and looking at ways to update the image — such as the club’s badge.

Though the new owners are certainly looking at ways of developing Chelsea for the future, they’re not going to abandon its history. There has been a lot of dialogue with fan groups since declaring their interest earlier this year. Supporters are also represented on the board following the appointments of Daniel Finkelstein and Barbara Charone. Making tweaks to the badge hasn’t been, and still isn’t, on the agenda.

The crest is a sensitive subject, particularly with older supporters. Before going into more detail on what the various symbols represent, it is worth reflecting quickly on the badge’s history.

For the majority of the first 50 years of Chelsea’s existence — they were formed in 1905 — the main image was that of a Chelsea pensioner, a tribute to the close association the club have with British war veterans based at the nearby Royal Hospital. It led to the team also being nicknamed the Chelsea Pensioners.

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But former manager Ted Drake, who led Chelsea to their first title in 1955, felt the depiction of the club as “pensioners” needed updating to a more intimidating and competitive logo. A blue lion took centre stage instead from 1953 and so it stayed, apart from a brief break during the 1960s, until 1986.

Former chairman Ken Bates decided to alter it, to much angst, four years after buying the club for £1 in 1982. The suggestion is the redesign was largely to do with trademarking, commercial activity and goods sold outside the ground. The new badge, a badly drawn lion wearing a darned sock, was deeply unpopular, especially as it was very similar to what London rivals Millwall have.

A return to the more traditional emblem seen on the shirts now was brought in within a few years of Abramovich’s takeover, to mark the club’s centenary. With the departure of Bates, fans took the opportunity to let the new regime know how much of an issue it was to them and the new regime listened.

An announcement about the badge was made to great fanfare at a press conference 18 years ago. Then chief executive Peter Kenyon said: “We are incredibly proud of Chelsea’s heritage. The design of this new badge is based on the one from the 1950s and it was a conscious decision to do this.

“As we approach our centenary year and the club embarks on a new and very exciting era, it is appropriate we have a new identity that reflects our tradition and can represent us for the next 100 years.”

So this explains what Chelsea have in the present day, with the rampant blue lion “regardant” (looking backwards) the dominant feature. One of the reasons this symbol was chosen in the first place back in the 1950s was because it was based on the family arms of Cadogan, who are major local landowners. Successive Cadogans were presidents of the club from its foundation to the early 1980s. The image of a lion and crozier was also from the borough coat of arms of Chelsea, incorporated in the early 1900s.

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The crozier (or staff) the lion is holding represents the Abbot of Westminster. Why would this be a connection? In medieval times, the manor of Chelsea was owned by the Abbey of Westminster.

To the left and right of the lion is one red football and one red Tudor rose on each side. The presence of a football obviously reflects the sport with which Chelsea are associated. As for the roses, there are a few theories about this. It may simply refer to a unified England (red and white rose combined), but the locality is rich in Tudor history, too, plus Chelsea’s pioneering youth scheme in 1947-48 was based around the Tudor Rose youth club on nearby Harrow Road. Finally, the modern badge incorporates elements of previous badges that included gold/yellow elements.

This is the badge that has been worn on the shirts for some of the club’s greatest triumphs, including the Champions League wins in 2012 and 2021. The connection with success is strong. It would make little sense to break with that tradition now.

(Top image: designed by Samuel Richardson)

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