How to turn grassroots sports into a brand
About 5 years ago, a group of my friends and I became invested in the NFL — a funny thing for English schoolboys. A few years of a fantasy league later and the now 14 of us in the league ventured to Portugal together for our draft day. We really became invested in the NFL.
But it was more than just fantasy NFL — it was the game of American Football. We started with throwing a pigskin around, and then a bit of route running and catching. Then came our first 4 v 4 touch game. So unstructured that it was built on the honesty of whether one ‘thought they caught it’ and inevitably checking random stud marks in the grass to see whether they had breached the imaginary out of bounds line. Truly beautiful days. The homeowners of the private road whose grass we destroyed made their grievances known and we moved slightly further afield, to the local sports field. Then we added another level of professionality — tags (or flags) — but of course, we don’t own tags, so we used long socks instead. True professionalism. Over the few years since, we have had a large pool of players come for a game (which almost by tradition finishes with ‘last touchdown wins’) and the Langton Green Flag Football League was born.
But now seems about time we stepped up our game.
My goal is to make the LGFFL a recognised member of the UK Flag Football community and be a driver of the game within the UK. I want to run mini-tournaments and potentially a summer camp for kids to share the great game and the good vibes of Flag Football. We need a recognisable brand. So, let’s begin.
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First, a logo.
I wanted to reflect the NFL Logo shape and knew from the start that I wanted to incorporate a Union Jack. With the outline of the logo created, I formed 18 variations (complete with spelling errors and blank spaces — I was new to this at the time). I’d love to tell you that the light teal and grey colour scheme had meaning behind it… but it’s just a lovely colour scheme.
The team collectively chose 8.
About 6 months later, when I began the next step in the process, I chose 9. It’s a flag football league — a dark grey should not be its primary logo colour.
The next step was to create an online presence. We had a ton of footage of our games and, cumulatively, a very strong knowledge of the game. So, I created the Instagram page @LG_FFL where we post professional looking content both about the LGFFL, and informative posts about flag football — including play design and game technique.
Subsequently, we had NFL wide receiver, Keelan Cole, reply to a comment on our page. Most likely unrelated to the brand development, yet possibly still our greatest success…
We began to get recognition over the Flag Football Community — even mainland European Teams began following our page whereupon we conjured dreams of a tour to Slovenia (we see you, Ljubljana Frogs). Some players even reached out to us asking whether they could join the team and whether we’d be playing matches again soon. So too were kit providers appreciating our brand, willing to offer us discounts to make our first ever kit. This leads us to step 4 (I think) — a professional-looking kit.
I created a mock-up with exact hex codes and detailed the customisations we wanted to the relevant brands. I needed as accurate estimates as possible. With a few offering discounts, we were able to speak to representatives and pit the competitive prices against one another, driving the price down significantly. We landed on Olik, a brand almost as new as us, who have thus far given us exceptional customer service alongside a crazy good price for customised shirts for every player.
And that’s where we stand. Shirts on the way and friendly matches being organised for the summer against some teams we’ve met on Instagram. But it won’t be the end. I plan to attain my BAFA coaching qualifications during the summer and accelerate the process towards holding a summer camp in the near future. I have started to produce the business proposal working out the financial efficacy of holding such a camp which will be presented to potential sponsors. I expect we’re not the only ones excited to put together the first youth American Football summer camp in the UK (to our knowledge). We’re building a brand from the grassroots — a brand the community will trust to grow the game in the UK.
A note on the role of a graphic designer:
Building a professional-looking brand means professional in everything we do — even though in practice we may just be a bunch of friends who throw a ball around occasionally.
I’ve learnt in this process that the role of a graphic designer goes so far beyond mere logos and media posts; behind-the-scenes documents, business proposals, sign up forms, terms and conditions, etc. can all be professionalized with a decent level of design. These two pages are obviously very basic in content, but the art of design is the ability to make anything seem basic. When I competed in the Cambridge Global Case Competition, I was able to create a business proposal that was complex but became intuitive through designing the charts and data manually on illustrator. Moreover, as a designer, you often know what is best for a brand in terms of media presence, so don’t be afraid to give some business-oriented guidance when presenting your work (for example, I had a personal trainer client and I advised that winning clientele through Instagram was about consistency with training advice and encouragement to join her services — both of which needed to include her logo and similar layouts so people automatically make the link back to her.)
