Killing The Game

A few years ago David Beckham created a new football team using nothing but good design and huge pile of money. Inter Miami is now a globally recognised team that has even has Lionel Messi, the best player to ever grace a football pitch, spending the twilight years of his career there. The whole project is a remarkably successful exercise in branding, the perfect expression of the cynically commercialised world of modern football.

So I thought, why don’t I try and make my own football team with nothing but good design and tiny pile of money? And in the process I can take the piss out of how this working class subculture has ended up becoming the PR plaything of billionaires and powerful political regimes.

This is the story of how I gave birth to Death FC for my upcoming show.

If you look at photos of football crowds from the 1950’s everyone is wearing an almost identical outfit: a coat/jacket, a hat and maybe a scarf with the bars of their team’s colours. The makeup of the crowd is also almost exclusively men and boys. The actual kits were for the players only, a hard earned emblem of their skill and ability.

Fast forward to today and your average Arsenal crowd (my team) is displaying a cornucopia of replica shirts from varying eras as well as a suite of luxury brand colab fashion items. In the last couple of years there has been Arsenal x Stella McCartney, Arsenal x Aries and Arsenal x A-COLD-WALL. There are now almost as many drops of new merch as there are matches for the fans to enjoy. The relentless proliferation of football team merchandise like this has transformed the culture of what it means to be a fan.

The players are now not just footballers but also models who need to serve looks in photoshoots as well as goals/assists on the pitch. Bukayo Saka’s excellent bone structure and cheeky grin are almost as valuable to the brand of Arsenal FC as his left foot. Football clubs are global brands now, and fashion is fast becoming their main weapon for growth.

I love both football and fashion, in theory I’m a willing victim for this conflated marketing exercise. But the last time I bought a replica kit was in 2007. When each new drop arrives the curmudgeon in me fires up a low block around my bank balance. I don’t want to encourage them I guess. This constant demand to display your allegiance in pseudo fashion items isn’t what it’s all about. The essence of supporting a football team isn’t defined what you can buy in the club shop.

In reality being a fan is a daily dance of emotions from anger to unbridled joy as well as an understanding of history, tradition, pride, respect and disrespect.

Disrespect is perhaps the most important aspect of my new team. I decided that a fun way to satirise this state of affairs (as well as piggyback on the trend) would be to create my own club that is just pure merch, no actual football. And so Death FC was born in my imagination.

Why Death? Well, its the theme of my work right now with my own contemporary version of a Dance of Death in the works for my upcoming solo show. And in recent years ‘fake’ football shirts (i.e not ones for actual teams) have come to be used as banners for causes at either end of the political spectrum. For example you can currently buy a Reform UK ‘10 Farage’ shirt or a FC Palestina shirt. Bands have also utilised this shift to the fashion football shirt for their merch, Oasis and Fontaines DC in particular.

So I’m also playing on this new idea of a football shirt as the emblem of a collective idea rather than one for an actual team. My collective idea is simple: remember death.

The design for a new club has to begin with the crest. On the global stage it is effectively the logo of a team. Practically the crest is also the base element from which the style and colours of the kit can flow. On a more emotional level Its the tiny shield that the players kiss to show their loyalty and fans get tattooed on their bodies to commit theirs. The crest is a piece of contemporary heraldry that can still make people charge with pride like Knights of the Round Table.

This is what David Beckham nailed for Inter Miami when he paid the the brilliant Kimou “Grotesk” Meyer to make him look cool and design their crest. If that piece of design had been a run-of-mill average badge then Inter Miami wouldn’t now have Messi playing with it on his chest. Whatever they paid Meyer it wasn’t enough. This is where I, as an artist and designer, have a chance to create something with its own kind of power that could one day make Death FC fly to all corners of the globe.

After playing around with a few more radical styles I decided to stick to a classic shield and banner setup. I want my crest to convey a false sense of history, as if Death FC has been around for as long as Liverpool or Arsenal. And the Dance of Death is a medieval archetype that ran through the Renaissance, which was a period in history when heraldry still mattered as a visual language. So I wanted to represent that history and tradition in the design for Death FC. Trying to make my crest clean and modern like the Inter Miami badge would have been a mistake.

If I want to I can always modernise this design in a few drops time after pressure from my imaginary shareholders to make brand Death FC feel more current in global markets. Capitalism doesn’t care about tradition. Just take a look at how they massacred my boy the Arsenal badge:

The Death FC shield is built around a simple quartered design with a black and white check to symbolise the duality of existence, but also because it makes for a very punchy print. In each quadrant there is a skull, an hourglass, a butterfly and a flower - all symbols of the transience of life as well as elements for me to play around with in the kit designs. Below the crest sits a simple banner with the club motto: “Memento Mori” the classic Latin phrase meaning “remember death.”

But the real fun starts with the fantastical sponsors I’ve given my team. Replica shirts are covered in the ugly logos of problematic brands desperate to piggyback on the excitement and collective feeling that a football club can elicit. Emirates hand over tens of millions of pounds a year to turn every Arsenal fan into a walking billboard for their airline. So my team should be no different, except that its sponsors need to represent the “brand values” of Death FC, i.e the foreboding presence of death in our lives.

For the main shirt sponsor I’ve invented my own airline ‘Fly Icarus’, a play on the old ‘Fly Emirates’ logo. Icarus the mythical hero who fell to his death when he flew too close to the sun wearing wings of feathers and beeswax made by his father Daedalus. The myth of Icarus is generally viewed as a cautionary tale against the dangers of excessive ambition, we now have the idiom “they flew too close to sun” from it.

Football is all about inflated ambition and egos coming down crashing onto the rocks. So the myth of Icarus feels like a good fit. But airlines are also killing the planet. We are both literally and metaphorically flying too close to the sun on the thousands of 747s that circle the globe daily. Airlines like Emirates try their best to sportswash away this guilt with sponsorship deals, but the eyes of Death FC see all.

On the shirt sleeve I continue on my hit job of the Arsenal sponsors (easiest to satirise what you know best) with “Visit Valhalla”, a pun on the “Visit Rwanda” sponsorship. Valhalla is the Norse mythological paradise reserved only for those who died gloriously in battle. Which is poignant because the Rwandan regime is waging a war of aggression in Democratic Republic of Congo killing thousands. They also sponsor fellow European giants Bayern Munich, Paris St-Germain and Athletico Madrid. Once again, the idea is that the Rwandan regime sportswash these crimes away with tens of millions of pounds to be placed in a prominent position within global football culture.

I’m not building a corporate brand with tens of millions of pounds of investment from shadowy men who want the project to make them look less evil, and I’m also not a major fashion label trying to make myself seem less detached from reality. Which means that I’m free to play. And as I’ve explored kit ideas and designed logos for imaginary corporate entities I’ve had an immense amount of fun artistically, which I hope comes across in the finished shirts. These Death FC shirts sit somewhere in between the realms of art, design and fashion. They can be taken as silly, serious or both

As with any fashion item the bottom line with these shirts is to make you look cool. The little in-jokes that I’ve fed into various parts of the design are a sideshow to overall impact of looking fresh when you step out in your Death FC 25/26 shirt.

What I really like about these shirts is that they can be worn equally by people who couldn’t give a shit about football and people who spend 75% of their waking hours thinking about it. In fact, if you don’t give a shit about football and you wear one of these I can guarantee you’ll attract the people who do care far too much (this may or may not be a good thing), because they can’t help but be sucked into deciphering the language of design that I’ve warped to create this new team.

I’m launching this new team at my upcoming solo show which opens on the 30th of October at 67 York Street Gallery in Marylebone. If you can’t make the exhibition then the kits and club scarf will then go up on my online shop a week or so after the show finished on the 2nd of November.

Part of the show is going to involve me creating an installation: the Death FC club shop. The official club shop is the merch machine of the modern football club, so mine needed to be no different. What I need from one of you is to come and be the first, and maybe only ever, Death FC club shop manager. This is a paid position for one night only on the 30th. If you’re free and up for it then send an email to hello@archieproudfoot.com and let me know what would make you a great member of team Death.