We spent a long time — longer than was probably healthy — staring at football club badges. All 55 of Australia's professional ones. We ranked them, argued about them, and in a few cases, genuinely felt a bit sorry for them. Here's what we found.

Here's a thing about football crests. You never notice the good ones. You just absorb them — the colours, the shape, the little image in the middle — until they become as natural and unremarkable as a friend's face. You only really see a football badge when something's wrong with it. When the typography looks like it was set by someone who'd heard of fonts but never actually used them. When the mascot looks clip-arted from a 1994 clip-art CD-ROM. When the name of the club has precisely nothing to do with where the club is from, or what it stands for, or what any sensible person would have chosen if given five minutes and a whiteboard.

Australia has a few of those. More than a few, if we're being honest.

The team behind Strip Tees have spent thirty-plus years working in brand strategy and design for big brands like Nike, Apple, Vodafone, Foxtel, and plenty of others — and for a while now, we've had a nagging feeling that Australian football clubs, across all four codes, haven't been given the design scrutiny they deserve. Not the angry-fan scrutiny ("I hate the new badge") but the proper, objective, here-are-the-seven-criteria-and-here-is-how-you-score kind of scrutiny.

So we did it. All 55. AFL, NRL, A-League, Rugby. Every single one. And we're going to tell you exactly what we found.

First, the method. Because we have one.

Before anyone accuses us of just having opinions (we do also have opinions, and we're happy to share them), the rankings are built on a consistent framework across seven criteria. We scored every crest out of five in each category. Add it up, divide by the maximum possible, and you get a percentage. Simple enough. But getting those seven criteria right — that took a while.

A football badge isn't just a logo. It's a statement of identity, a flag, a piece of cultural shorthand that has to work on the back of a jersey, as a ten-pixel avatar on a phone screen, and as a tattoo on someone's forearm in twenty years when they win the premiership. It has to do a lot of things simultaneously and it has to do them without looking like it's trying.

• NameDoes the name reflect where the club is from and what it stands for? Or is it just a word someone liked the sound of?
• ColourDo the colours work together and are intrinsic to the club, or were they chosen because they looked nice together on a Monday morning?
• CreativityIs there an original thought here, or are we looking at the thousandth snarling animal in a shield?
• EmblemDoes the central image — the mascot, the symbol, the thing in the middle — actually connect to the club's place and history?
• TypographyIs the text legible, hierarchically correct, and does it feel like it belongs to the same family as everything else?
• TechnicalDoes it work at every size? On every surface? In black and white? On a stadium billboard and a phone notification?
• IllustrationIs the artwork actually good? Skilled? Considered? Or does it look like it was traced from a free image site?

The winner, and why it wasn't a surprise — except that it was

The Western Sydney Wanderers won. Scored 91.43 out of a possible 100. And if you know anything about football branding, you probably nodded when you read that. But here's the thing — if you'd told anyone in 2012 that a brand-new A-League club, formed from scratch, playing out of Parramatta, would end up with the finest football crest in Australian sport, they'd have been sceptical. New clubs don't do this. New clubs get generic names and committee-approved logos and strip the personality out of everything in an attempt to appeal to everyone, which means they appeal to no one.

The Wanderers did the opposite. They went into the community first. They asked what the area meant to people. They understood that Western Sydney has a footballing history dating back to the Wanderers match against the Kings School rugby team on 14 August 1880, that predates the A-League by over a century — the waves of Italian, Croatian, Macedonian, Lebanese immigrants who built the grassroots game in the 1950s and 60s. And they honoured it. The red and black badge, with its clean circular design and its subtle nods to that history, is the kind of crest that looks like it was always there. That's the highest compliment you can pay a new design. It looks inevitable.

The Wellington Phoenix came second with 88.57%. An A-League club from New Zealand — and honestly, looking at that crest, you can see why. The typography is gorgeous. The phoenix is classically illustrated. The symmetry is exact. The colours are clear. The placement of "FC" is clever. It's the kind of badge that wouldn't look out of place on a La Liga strip, and we mean that entirely as a compliment.

Third was Auckland FC, the newest club in the competition, with 82.86%. Borrowing from Inter Milan (not a bad team to borrow from), it has a hidden 'A' forming the top of the shield, nods to the knight theme, and a colour scheme that actually makes sense. For a brand new badge, it's remarkably self-assured.

The Rabbitohs, and what happens when you get it exactly right for long enough

Fourth place went to the South Sydney Rabbitohs, and this one requires a small digression, because the Rabbitohs are genuinely unusual. Their badge — a leaping white rabbit in a red and green diamond — doesn't include the club's name anywhere. No "South Sydney." No "NRL." Just the rabbit. And because they've been doing this for the best part of a century, it works in a way that it simply wouldn't for any club that tried it today.

The Rabbitohs have done something remarkable: they've turned their badge into something that sits equally comfortably on a football jersey and on a Supreme-style streetwear drop. Redfern kids wear that rabbit the way New York kids wear the Yankees 'NY'. It's transcended sport. It's become fashion. The execution of the illustration is top-notch — confident, clean, icon-level quality.

We marked a few clubs down for not including their name on the badge. The Rabbitohs earned the right to do this. A century of brand equity is a legitimate defence.

The things that kept going wrong

After looking at 55 crests in detail, certain problems kept recurring. Not occasionally. Constantly. So let's name them.

The nickname problem

Think about what a badge is actually doing. It's a piece of visual communication. It shows you something — an animal, a symbol, an image — and that image carries meaning. The moment you write the name of the image underneath the image, you've admitted that the image isn't doing its job. Worse, you've told your fans that you don't trust them to understand it. The Brisbane Lions badge has a lion on it. Below the lion, it says "Lions." The Hawthorn badge has a hawk on it. Below the hawk, it says "Hawks." These are clubs with generations of supporters who have lived and died for those colours, who can recite the club song in their sleep, who named their children after players — and the badge is quietly suggesting they might not be able to identify a common bird of prey.

It matters beyond aesthetics. Every time you duplicate the nickname in text, you add visual noise, reduce legibility at small sizes, and waste the hierarchy the badge desperately needs. The Nike swoosh doesn't say "Nike." The Apple logo doesn't say "Apple." The Rabbitohs badge doesn't say anything at all — and it's the fourth best crest in the country. The image is either strong enough to carry the badge or it isn't. Writing the word next to it doesn't make the image stronger. It just makes you look like you don't believe in it.

The location problem

There's a peculiarly Australian tendency for sports clubs to jettison their geographical roots in the belief that it will make them more universally appealing. The Western Bulldogs ditched "Footscray." Various clubs have adopted names like "Glory," "Victory," "Storm," and "Force" — words that gesture vaguely at athletic achievement without saying anything about who the club is, where it comes from, or why anyone should care.

This is a mistake, and the evidence is global. Barcelona. Liverpool. Juventus. Manchester United. Celtic. None of them lost supporters by naming themselves after a place. Quite the opposite. A location is not a constraint — it's an anchor. It's the thing that makes a club feel like it belongs to someone. When you strip it out, you don't get universal appeal. You get a logo that could belong to a gym chain.

Has anyone actually been to Liverpool? Genuinely asking. Two of the greatest football clubs on earth. One of the greatest music legacies in human history. And it is, by most objective measures, a fairly grim post-industrial port city with a wind problem and a city centre that's still working out what it wants to be. Nobody cares. Nobody has ever looked at the Liver Bird on that badge and thought, "well, I'd want to support them more if they were called something grander." The place is the point. The place is what gives the whole thing meaning. Strip it out and you've got a red badge with a bird on it. Keep it in and you've got 140 years of identity so powerful it's followed around the world by people who've never been within five thousand miles of Merseyside and never will be.

And you don't have to go to Spain or Italy to find the proof. Collingwood is a suburb of inner Melbourne — about three square kilometres of terrace houses, cafes, and warehouses a couple of kilometres from the CBD. It has a population of roughly 10,000 people. It is, by any conventional measure, a small place. And yet Collingwood Football Club is the most followed club in Australian sport, with supporters in every state and territory, in every demographic, in every tax bracket. Named after a tiny suburb. Built their entire identity on it. Never once felt the need to rebrand as "Victoria United" or "Metropolitan Force." The name is the brand. The suburb is the soul. The rest followed.

The American problem

Australian football — all four codes of it — has had a complicated relationship with American sports aesthetics for about thirty years. The heavy drop shadows. The shield shapes. The aggressive snarling mascots. The chrome effects. The fonts that seem to have been designed by someone who'd watched a lot of NFL and decided that was the look of sporting authority.

It doesn't have to be this way. Japan's football crests are extraordinary. South American clubs have some of the most beautiful badges in the world. European football, particularly in England and Italy, has produced genuine design classics. Australian clubs have access to a rich visual tradition — Indigenous Australian art, the landscape, the multicultural urban experience — and too many of them have ignored it in favour of something that looks like it was assembled using clip art from a 1998 American sports design annual.

The typography problem

This was the single lowest-scoring category across the entire study. Only the A-League averaged a pass mark. AFL managed 35.79%. NRL got 24.71%. Rugby a miserable 24%.

Typography on a football badge is not a secondary concern. It's often the first thing your eye lands on. It's what tells you the badge is professional or amateur, confident or confused. And yet club after club treats it as an afterthought — the thing you do after you've drawn the eagle or the shark or the Viking (more on that in a moment). Fonts are chosen because they look bold, not because they're appropriate. The club name is squeezed into whatever space the illustration left over. The nickname is set larger than the location, which is precisely backwards.

The code wars: which football code has the best design culture?

When you average every club's score across all seven criteria, by code, the answer is actually quite clear.

The A-League winning this is both surprising and not. Surprising because the A-League is only twenty years old — it doesn't have the heritage that AFL or NRL clubs can draw on. Not surprising because newer clubs, freed from decades of accumulated design baggage, sometimes get to think more clearly about what a badge should be. Auckland FC is a year old and scored 82.86%. That's not a coincidence — that's what happens when you approach brand design as a strategic exercise rather than a committee exercise.

The AFL's second place is deserved. The AFL has the best naming conventions of any code — 84.21% average — because most of its clubs have retained genuine geographic identity. Collingwood is still Collingwood. Richmond is still Richmond. Carlton hasn't rebranded itself "Victoria United" in an attempt to seem more inclusive. The heritage clubs understand that the name is the brand.

The NRL's third place comes with caveats. Strong on colour and emblems — the league's older clubs have mascots with genuine local meaning — but let down badly by typography and, more significantly, by a handful of clubs that have either adopted meaningless names or abandoned their locations entirely.

Rugby sits fourth, and frankly the gap between the Waratahs and everything else in that code is alarming. The Melbourne Rebels came last in the entire study — all 55 clubs — with 14.29%. The badge is a mess of disconnected elements, awkward kerning, and inverse hierarchy that suggests the designers were either overruled at every turn or given an impossible brief.

A few specific mentions, because some of these really do need to be said

The Geelong Cats — clever, but come on

The use of negative space to draw the cat in the Geelong crest is genuinely brilliant. It's the kind of design thinking that makes you smile when you first notice it — the shape of what isn't there creating the shape of what is. Smart. Original. 5 out of 5 for creativity, our highest single creativity score in the AFL.

Then they wrote "CATS" underneath a picture of a cat. The word. Under the image. As if the fans of a club that has played for over a century might not have realised what animal was depicted. It's like a joke that has a brilliant setup and then explains the punchline.

The Gold Coast Suns — a study in missed opportunity

The sun. The Gold Coast. The warmth. The light. The distinctive quality of that particular corner of Queensland. Japan built an entire aesthetic empire around the rising sun motif. There is so much to work with here. And what did the Suns produce? A crest that looks more like a rice brand than a football club, with typography so poor it scored zero. Zero. The written nickname sits inside the badge undermining everything around it. This isn't a design failure — it's a series of decisions, each one making the previous one worse.

The Canberra Raiders — genuinely confusing

The Canberra Raiders play in the nation's capital. Their mascot is a Viking. Their name evokes pillaging. We have questions. Not about the illustration — it's actually well-drawn. Not about the typography — it's neat enough. But about the fundamental decision to name a team from the Australian Capital Territory after Norse invaders and then put a Scandinavian warrior on the badge. What does that have to do with Canberra? What does it say about the club? Who made this decision, and did they know they'd have to explain it forever?

The Parramatta Eels — a retro masterclass

74.29%. Second in the NRL behind only the Rabbitohs. The Eels badge has a cool retro quality that connects directly to Parramatta's glory years in the 1980s — and the illustration, the colours, the general energy of the thing all cohere in a way that many newer badges completely fail to achieve. It's not perfect. The eel as a crest shape is a missed opportunity — imagine actually housing the badge inside the eel's form. But what's there is warm, confident, and proud of where it comes from.

The state of origin: which region actually wins?

We also ranked every state, territory, and New Zealand. The results were instructive.

New Zealand topped the table with 73.33% — which, given they had Wellington Phoenix, Auckland FC, and the Warriors (who scored 34.29% and dragged the average down considerably), tells you just how good those first two crests are. Tasmania came second with 71.43%, solely on the strength of the new Devils badge. South Australia edged into third at 61.90%, with NSW close behind at 60.16%.

Queensland came last with 46.07%. Five teams. A spectacular natural environment. One of the most distinctive and beloved corners of the country. And the average crest quality is the lowest of any region in the study. The Cowboys scored 22.86%. The Storm — we know, technically Victoria, but the point stands — scored 17.14%. These are not scores that suggest design is being taken seriously.

What good design actually does

There's a version of this discussion that treats football badge design as a fun sideshow — a nice-to-have, a cosmetic concern, something that matters to designers but not to the people actually running clubs. We'd push back on that pretty firmly.

A football badge is the first thing a potential fan sees. It's on every piece of merchandise. It's on every social media post. It's what a child points at and says "that one." It's what a tattooist is asked to replicate on someone's arm. It's what a sponsor's logo sits next to for five years on a jersey. In a market where four codes compete for the same fans, the same TV dollars, the same merchandise spend — design is not a trivial variable.

The clubs that score highest in our study — the Wanderers, the Phoenix, the Rabbitohs, the Swans — all have something in common beyond good design. They have strong supporter cultures. They have genuine identity. They mean something to people beyond simply being the local team. That's not a coincidence. Great design doesn't cause great culture, but it reflects it, amplifies it, and gives it a visual form that people can hold onto.

The clubs at the bottom of our table — and we're thinking of the Melbourne Storm, the GWS Giants, the Melbourne Rebels, the North Queensland Cowboys — all have something else in common. Their crests feel like they could belong to anyone. They're interchangeable. They don't say: "We are specifically this club, from this place, with this history." They say: "We are a professional sporting franchise." And that's not nothing, but it's not enough.

The trends shaping what comes next

A few things are happening across the whole landscape of football crest design — in Australia and globally — that are worth understanding, because they'll shape what the next generation of badges looks like.

Social media has changed the geometry of what works. The avatar — that tiny square on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok — has become the primary format in which most fans encounter a club's visual identity. Anything with fine detail, pale colours, complex typography, or an awkward shape reads as mush at 48 pixels. The clubs that understand this are simplifying. The clubs that don't are producing badges that look fine on a jersey and invisible on a phone.

The Yankees effect is real. The New York Yankees' interlocking 'NY' — type used as pure graphic form — has become one of the most replicated design strategies in global sport. Carlton gets it. The Western Sydney Wanderers get it in a different way. Melbourne is circling it. The idea that a letterform, used confidently enough, can carry the whole weight of a brand identity without any illustration at all — that's a genuinely powerful insight, and Australian football is slowly waking up to it.

And the Rabbitohs model — the single, nameless image — is being chased by clubs that haven't earned the right to try it yet. The Panthers, the Dolphins, the Roosters: all experimenting with badge-less or name-less visual identities. It works for Souths because they've been building that rabbit's cultural capital for ninety years. For everyone else, it's a gamble. The image has to be strong enough to carry the whole club. Most images aren't.

So what does it all mean?

It means the Western Sydney Wanderers got it right, and the lesson is reproducible. Go into the community first. Understand the history. Find the visual language that connects the club to the place. Execute it with professional rigour and genuine craft. Don't name yourself after a weather phenomenon, a vague concept of athletic achievement, or a group of people from a completely different continent.

It means the A-League — the youngest of the four codes — has the highest average design quality, and that's not an accident. It's what happens when you build a brand from scratch with clear intent instead of accumulating visual decisions over sixty years of committee meetings.

It means typography is being treated as an afterthought by most clubs in most codes, and it shouldn't be, because typography is often the first thing you read and the thing that tells you whether the people behind the badge were serious or not.

And it means there are about fifteen clubs who should genuinely be embarrassed by their crests — not in a wounds-that-won't-heal way, but in a "this is fixable and you should fix it" way. The data is there. The examples are there. The Wanderers proved it can be done. Some of you have had your current badge for thirty years and it still looks like someone's first attempt at Photoshop. That is not a heritage worth protecting. That is a problem worth solving.