Rambling Lemurian

This week, the newest NWSL franchise announced their team name and branding. Fans knew for a long time that Boston was getting a team. The team had almost two years to decide on a name. They could have gone with an homage to the past as the new “Boston Breakers”, or some soccerish version of that like “Breaker FC”. The owners could have referenced their own ownership group name (Boston Unity Soccer Partners) and picked “Boston Unity FC” or “Boston United”. Or they could have picked any unused animal, natural phenomenon, or historic reference to Boston and/or Massachusetts. There’s so much to choose from.

Instead, the team went with BOS Nation FC. And they have been justifiably ridiculed across social media for it (as well as their cringey “Too Many Balls” marketing campaign, which is a whole other topic). The logic behind that name is the BOS Nation is an anagram of Bostonian, and they wanted a name that represented the entire city. I guess just using “Bostonians” would have been too easy for them.

I don’t particularly like Boston when it comes to sports, and enjoy watching their teams lose and their fans get angry and sad and expose themselves as terrible people (of course I’m generalizing, it’s a blog!). But I couldn’t even get a laugh out of this terrible name choice. But it got me thinking about how bad recent sports branding efforts have been.

I’m a sucker for expansion teams. There’s something so exciting about a new pro team showing up, even if it’s not in your market. When the Vegas Golden Knights first appeared, I bought a hat despite being a Blackhawks fan and not even being a huge fan of the logo and name. I bought a Seattle Kraken shirt for my wife when they announced their name and branding. I’ll read every article about upcoming or rebranding teams in just about any pro league in North America. I love the passionate speculating of future team names and logos and will even dream up hypothetical names and color schemes for a future Chicago pro women’s hockey team, or second NFL team, or whenever Pro Cricket makes its way here.

But, folks, we are in an epidemic right now. We are in an era of terrible branding in pro sports in the US and Canada, not to mention all the Quartneigh’s, Jaxxxon’s and Jennyfyr’s running around playgrounds nowadays. But let’s stick to sports, as they say. When did team branding become so complicated? Every franchise’s marketing team now seems to be led by MBAs and Consultants more interested in promoting BIG BRAND culture. We need months and years of focus groups, trademark research, and SEO research to come up with a “perfect” name like BOS Nation FC which ends up so polarizing that it halts the initial momentum needed to gain fan support.

Salt Lake City finally pulled the Coyotes out of the desert literally and metaphorically and got their NHL team. But for at least a year their fans have to root for the exciting “Utah Hockey Club” as ownership deliberates over their name options. They announced the final list of options: Utah Blizzard, Utah Mammoth, Utah Outlaws, Utah Venom, Utah Yeti, and Utah HC. Granted, the franchise moving to Utah was done rather abruptly so they didn’t have as much time to figure out the branding as most new teams. But it’s fair to still say all those options are bad. Yeti is theoretically original, at least. But one can reasonably argue they are just piggy-packing off the cryptid theme set by the Seattle Kraken. Many unofficial fan submissions on Twitter/X, Facebook, Reddit, and anywhere else you look are far better than these Park-District-Youth-Team-esque names.

The newly rebranded PWHL had to do a hard pivot when their initial set of team names were leaked on social media and promptly trashed by fans. The new team names of Fleet, Sirens, Frost, Victoire, Charge, and Sceptres are only moderately better than the initial set of Wicked, Sound, Superior, Echo, Alert, and Torch. Unfortunately this league as a history of questionable name choices back to their NWHL days when they had teams like the Beauts, Whale (singular), and Six.

The MLS also has a history of unnecessary and regressive branding. Ask fans of the Chicago Fire (now Chicago Fire FC with an inferior logo) and Columbus Crew (Crew SC) feel about their rebrands as the league decided to co-opt traditional European naming conventions for all their teams in a desperate attempt to appear more relevant on the global soccer stage.

Take a peak at the latest expansion teams and rebrands from the major North American leagues:

NFL – Houston Texans (2002) – They couldn’t come up with a more generic name?
NFL – Washington Commanders (2022) – After finally ditching the racist name Redskins, the franchise lived as “Washington Football Team” before finding a name to pander to the military industrial complex of the DC area, which appears to be short-lived anyway as new ownership is reportedly considering a rebrand of their own.
MLB – Tampa Bay Rays (2008) – The original name was the Devil Rays. They dropped “Devil” because the religious snowflakes in Florida were triggered by it. Devil Rays was much better. “Rays” sounds like it’s a team of middle-aged suburban dads wearing flannel shirts.
NBA – Charlotte Bobcats (2004) – This high-school-caliber name matched their on-court performance. It was lame enough they had to rebrand to the old Charlotte Hornets 10 years later
NHL – Vegas Golden Knights (2017) – A name so clunky they couldn’t even fit the full city name.
NHL – Seattle Kraken (2021) – It gets points for uniqueness but it’s still an awkward name.
MLS – Austin FC, Charlotte FC, St. Louis City SC, San Diego FC (2021-2025) – Is it hypocritical of me to blast “BOS Nation FC” for being weird while also criticizing these traditional boring names? No. These are boring and bad.
NWSL – Bay FC (2024) – Nothing much to be said here, also boring.

Is this just a form of reverse recency bias? Would I hate the name “White Sox”, or, “Packers”, or “Sixers” if they were new teams rather than ones I’ve grown up seeing? Am I just turning into an old man yelling at clouds and MBA grads? Perhaps. It’s not like ALL new names are bad though. Angel City FC, Gotham FC, and the Golden State Valkyries are some really cool recent examples of brands done right (so far). But maybe with sports across all leagues turning into businesses run by Marketing teams and statisticians, teams are forgetting that names don’t need to be overthought. It ultimately doesn’t matter what a team name is. As long as the team is easy to root for, fans will buy the merch and get used to the name. It would just be nice if team owners and their marketing departments would make it easy on us fans from the get-go. It’s ok to pick a somewhat “boring” name like the “Boston Ducks” or “Boston Unity FC”. Make the product on the field, court, or ice exciting and hire good people to be the face of your organizations, and the rest will take care of itself.