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.