Inside Leeds United’s home kit design: Peacocks, progression and trying to ‘nail it’ - The Athletic 28/7/23
By Phil Hay
The road through professional football is literate with kits
people loved, kits they hated and designers who created both. Hell hath no fury
like a fanbase presented with contentious shirts, as Ed Cowburn discovered with
his first concept for a European club.
Cowburn, the founder of design company Acid FC, can smile
about it now because, over time, those kits he drew up for Red Star, a
lower-league club based in Paris, became cult classics; so popular they are
almost impossible to lay your hands on now. Adidas was taken with them to the
extent it told Cowburn it would feature the designs in its brand book for years
to come.
But not everyone was instantly sold and not everyone was
gentle.
One Red Star supporter, briefly incensed, created an
Instagram account with a title which, however it was precisely worded in
French, amounted to ‘Fuck Acid FC’. As snap verdicts go, it was pulling no
punches. “So I know exactly how fan feedback works,” Cowburn says. “I know how
much responsibility all of this involves.” And in that scenario, the last laugh
was his.
A fortnight ago, Leeds United released their home shirt for
the 2023-24 season, a fairly simple design, it is largely white save for the
club’s badge, Adidas’ trademark stripes in yellow and blue on the sleeves and a
touch of branding. Almost 15,000 were bought in the week the shirt went on
sale, but the success of it was demonstrated best by a reveal which passed off
with almost no dissent at all.
Cowburn, a Leeds fan himself, was central to creating the
concept and he, the club and Adidas managed to hit an elusive sweet spot:
producing a top which nobody seemed inclined to slate.
For kit manufacturers, unanimous approval is not the average
summer.
🔥 The 23/24 @adidasfootball x #LUFC home shirt is available in store and online at 9am
— Leeds United (@LUFC) July 11, 2023
Selling shirts is one thing Leeds United consistently do
well, regardless of how appealing the garment concerned actually is. They
shifted 250,000 in their first season back in the Premier League three years
ago, placing them in the division’s top six, and the sales of 15,000 in week
one of availability this month is, the club say, a marked increase on summer
2022.
But for those with skin in the game, and those like Cowburn
who are all about the design, aesthetic appeal is everything. Are people happy
when it is revealed? “It’s unlike anything in the fashion world,” Cowburn says.
“Because football kits are for infants up to grandparents, which just isn’t the
case with most markets. How do you nail it?”
Cowburn and Acid FC were enlisted by Adidas to help create
this season’s kits for Leeds on the basis of his work for Red Star, who also
had Adidas as a supplier. Cowburn’s resume is somewhat varied: he studied law
and accounting at university but went back to college to pursue a career in
creative design after “taking a job in insurance and hating it”.
“Friends of mine were designers and I kept thinking, ‘That’s
what I should have done’,” he says. “I remembered designing kits on the lounge
floor watching (Saturday lunchtime football show) Saint & Greavsie back in
the 1980s. I started Acid FC in 2018 and it was basically a way to get certain
ideas off my chest because football was my passion.”
The aim was to create new ideas for branding in football; as
its mission statement states, to “engage, disrupt and inspire”. Cowburn created
an Instagram account to publicize his concepts and it was there that Red Star
made contact through David Bellion, the former Sunderland and Manchester United
striker. Bellion had finished his playing career with Red Star and then taken a
job as the club’s creative director. “We got chatting, we got on really well
and I was invited to do the pitch for (their kit for) the 2019-20 season,”
Cowburn says.
By any measure, the home and away shirts he came up with were
different. Out there, even. They had a traditional wallpaper effect and
featured 11 scenes documenting the history of the Paris club. The home shirt
was Red Star’s traditional green, the away a mix of white and pink. “Some of
the initial reaction was ‘it’s awful’ — and a lot worse than that,” Cowburn
says. “It was quite frightening at the time. But you know, the emotion of all
this is massive. At Red Star, I saw it in full effect.
” They’re only a small club but every fan feels the same
way. It’s no different if you’re a Leeds fan or a Red Star fan. It’s the sense
of ‘This is our identity’, and if you’re doing the design, there’s that
question people ask: ‘What do you know about our club? How dare you get it
wrong or have an opinion. We’ve got our opinions and those are the right ones’.
That’s how it is and I get it.
“But Adidas thought the Red Star concept was awesome. And it
is now seen as a cult classic. I saw online polls of the best kit of the year
and it was regularly in the top two or three. I learned how difficult the job
of designing a kit can be and the stress it involves.
“When it came to the Leeds kit, I had some fear but I also had confidence because I liked what we’d done. And I’m a fan, too.”
Born in Leeds in the mid-1980s and a supporter of the club
all his life, Cowburn had told Adidas that if there was ever an opportunity to
work on their kit, he would jump at it. That chance came in late 2021 when, in
a demonstration of how far in advance clubs now plan their shirts, Leeds began
working on designs for 2023-24. Back when the process started, Marcelo Bielsa
was still the manager of what was still a Premier League team. They had another
batch of kits to release, for last season, before this one saw the light of
day.
“I look at it as a football fan would,” Cowburn says. “The
kit’s the key identifier of what a club is, especially the home kit. Kits evoke
a powerful emotional response. You can remember the first kit you ever got.
“I often got them for Christmas. You’d seen the players
playing in it for three or four months and then you’re waiting for that moment
where you get to have it and pull it on. That feeling never leaves you. It’s a
reminder of when you were young, your formative years — like music you get into
in your teenage years and then listen to for the rest of your life.
“You’ve got to balance the tension between history and
nostalgia but be progressive — trying to create kits which do the same thing
for a nine-year-old now.”
At the point where planning started, 49ers Enterprises — the U.S. investment fund which bought the club outright this month — was only a minority shareholder, but Cowburn says it was influential in pushing the design of the coming season’s shirts. “They wanted to do a bit more around kits that told stories,” he says. “That’s what I try to do, too. I don’t like doing things just because they look nice without having a reason for it.” Nevertheless, close season after close season has told him the Leeds fanbase still want a kit that looks nice.
Cowburn, the club and Adidas settled on a peacock concept,
harking back to Leeds’ old nickname and the bird which appeared on their badge
in the 1980s. Peacock feathers provide a repeat pattern through the white body
of the shirt and the nape of the neck has a peacock emblem on it. “We’ve done a
simple job,” Cowburn says. “And I think it ticks all the boxes. I wanted there
to be as much white as possible, with just the stripes as colour. It was always
in my head that it had to be the classic colours. I’m really proud of it.”
Next up are the away and third kits, both of which follow
the peacock concept, too. In design terms, these tops are likely to be less
safe than a white home version and might well provoke a more mixed response.
Change shirts tend to carry more unusual designs and colors and some can be a
slow burn in terms of gaining popularity. Leeds were criticized for the
charcoal-and-pink effort they released as their away top for the 2019-20 season
but it is now emblematic of their long-awaited promotion back to the Premier
League and in no time it became their second-best-selling strip ever.
“That’s where it starts to get a little bit more
interesting,” Cowburn says. “Whereas I maybe had relative confidence in the
home kit, this (the second and third kits) is where you probably think more
about what might happen, what the reaction might be, what sort of lightning rod
I might be.”
For now, though, the home shirt has struck a chord. And in a
difficult post-relegation summer with competitive challenges aplenty, it did
Leeds no harm to register a win with their kit design.
Not long after it was released, Cowburn was sent a photo of
someone whose forearm had been tattooed with the peacock feather design that
features on the top. “You know it’s gone down well when the pattern’s being
used for that,” he says.
And in that respect, he can sleep soundly.