The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
On consecutive days last week, Charlotte and Seattle announced their newest professional sports franchises in MLS and the NHL, respectively. The Charlotte Major League Soccer team is going to be called Charlotte FC. The Seattle National Hockey League team is going to be called the Kraken.
Charlotte followed the recent trend of American soccer teams using the European naming convention for its team. In Europe, team names generally are the city or geographic area in which the team plays followed (or preceded) by some version of “football club.” Occasionally, someone will get wild and throw in “Inter,” for international, or “Real,” for royal. Fans often assign nicknames – the Wolverhampton Football Club is popularly known as the Wolves – but teams do not typically have an official animal or character namesake.
Seattle, on the other hand, leaned into animal branding with the incredibly cool name Kraken. Great team names have a brilliance to them that transcends a fierce creature native to the area: Arizona Diamondbacks, Miami Dolphins, Charlotte Hornets. Those names are iconic because they weren’t just picked from a list of clipart animals. They have real resonance with the communities and a WOW factor that broadens their appeal far beyond their geographic region. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, there were as many Charlotte Hornets caps and shirts worn in Toledo as Detroit Pistons or Cleveland Cavaliers.
I will be the first to admit that I am not Charlotte FC’s target market. I don’t care much about soccer and would not regularly go to games (or matches or scrums or whatever they call them) or watch them on TV. Had they come up with a legitimate name and logo (soccer calls them crests), though, civic pride would have required that I buy a cap and maybe even gone to a game/match/scrum.
In truth, I am not significantly more a hockey fan than I am a soccer fan. I’ve been to a handful of games over the years, and own a couple of Toledo Goaldiggers/Walleye caps, more out of nostalgia than fandom. But Seattle Kraken is one of those generationally awesome team names that eclipses sports and geographic boundaries. I will admit that when I first saw the logo, a stylized blue “S” with a glaring red eye and a negative space tentacle, my first impression was that it wasn’t tentacle-y enough. Then I realized that anything more graphic would be too cartoon-like, which is the danger in graphic design with mythical monsters. The S logo is timeless and understated. I could see myself buying that cap.
Charlotte FC’s logo is, well, what you might expect from the creative team that names a club that plays football in Charlotte the Charlotte Football Club, a clipart crown in Carolina Panthers colors. And just a comment about that “FC” thing. Usually, I get a little perturbed when sports teams refuse to identify the sport they play by the name it’s called. In the United States, the game is called soccer, not football. But, if they were intent on going the Name of City FC/SC route, I can’t fault them for avoiding the geographic conundrum of Charlotte SC.