Aston Villa badge history: the lion rampant, the star and new crest

The Aston Villa crest has carried a lion for almost as long as the club has existed. Villa were founded in 1874 and the Scottish lion rampant first appears in 1878; close to 150 years later, the shield adopted on 31 May 2024 still puts a yellow lion on a light-blue field. In between, the lion has lost its claws and got them back, picked up a star, shed a motto, been boxed into a circle for a season and released again. Few clubs have argued with themselves about a badge quite so publicly, or quite so often since 2007.

What follows is the Aston Villa badge history in order, from the first lion to the new Villa badge, with the details that tell the versions apart.

Why the Aston Villa badge has a lion

Historical Football Kits describes it plainly as a "Scottish lion rampant": the upright, clawing lion of Scottish heraldry, the same beast that sits on the Royal Banner of Scotland. Why a Birmingham club settled on a Scottish emblem is a question supporters still argue over in the pub. The certain part is simpler. The lion was in place by 1878, four years after the club was formed, and every badge since has kept it.

It is not the only lion rampant in British football. Rangers carry one on their crest in Glasgow, and the Rangers badge uses it alongside a one-word motto, much as Villa did for decades. Chelsea's lion arrived by a completely different route, through the arms of the old borough.

For most of its first century the Villa lion lived off the shirt. It went on the kit for the first time in 1956, tied to an FA Cup run; Villa lifted the cup the following year, beating Manchester United 2–1 at Wembley in 1957.

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Aston Villa badge history, 1956 to 2016

The next landmark is 1973, when a new crest was introduced. Villa were a Second Division side at the time, a few years away from the League Cup wins, league title and European nights that made the badge famous across the continent.

The 2007 redesign, in the Martin O'Neill era, was the one that started the arguments. It added a small white star for the 1982 European Cup, won 1–0 against Bayern Munich in Rotterdam. Nobody objected to the star. The lion was a different matter, because in the new drawing it had lost its claws, and a lion rampant without claws looks more like a startled cat than a heraldic beast. The motto "Prepared", in English rather than Latin, stayed under the shield.

In April 2016 the club announced the fix for 2016/17. The design studio SomeOne redrew the crest, put the claws back and removed "Prepared" altogether. Supporters got their lion back and lost their word.

The claws, the star and the dropped motto

Those three details are the quickest way to date any Villa shirt or scarf. A lion with claws and the word "Prepared" underneath means pre-2007. A star with a clawless lion means 2007 to 2016. Claws, star and no motto means 2016 onwards.

The motto was always a slightly odd one for a football crest. Most clubs that carry words chose Latin, Everton's "Nil Satis Nisi Optimum" and Tottenham's "Audere est Facere" among them. Villa's was a single English word, plain to the point of bluntness, and in its way more Birmingham than any Latin tag. The star has outlived both changes and is the one element every version since 2007 agrees on.

Villa share that habit of recording a European Cup on the badge with Nottingham Forest, who carry two stars above their tree for 1979 and 1980.

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The roundel, the vote and the new Villa badge

In November 2022 the club put two designs to supporters. A round crest won 77% of the vote; the alternative, built around a gas lamp, took 23%. The roundel went on the shirts for 2023/24 and lasted exactly one season.

The verdict did not take long. On 2 October 2023, barely two months into the season, the club reopened the consultation, saying it "has not seen the anticipated commercial impact" of the roundel and that a redesign was planned for 2024/25. A version of the new Villa badge leaked in January 2024, and on 31 May 2024 it became official.

That makes the roundel the shortest-lived main crest in the Aston Villa badge history, and the 2023/24 shirts the only ones that carry it. Manchester City kept the roundel they adopted in 2016, and the Man City badge shows how differently the same shape can land. The pattern of a quick reverse after supporters push back is familiar from Merseyside, where the Everton badge changed in 2013 and was redrawn again in 2014 after supporters objected.

Reading the current Aston Villa crest

The current Aston Villa crest, the 2024 shield, is, in the words of Historical Football Kits, "remarkably similar to the earlier versions". It carries a yellow lion rampant, with claws, on a light-blue shield. A claret and white outline frames it, "ASTON VILLA" and "1874" are lettered in, and the white star for 1982 sits in place. There is no motto. The colours repeat the shirt: claret, light blue and the yellow of the lion.

Put next to the old Aston Villa badge of the 2000s, the current crest is cleaner and better drawn but not radically different, which was the point. It also arrived at a good moment. The first season of the new shield, 2024/25, was the one in which Villa returned to the European Cup's modern form, the Champions League, for the first time since the early 1980s, and reached the quarter-finals before going out to Paris Saint-Germain. The roundel had been worn in the season that earned the place; the shield got the nights. After the roundel, the club needed a crest that looked as if it had always been there, and it got one.

The wider story of how England's top-flight crests changed sits in the evolution of Premier League club badges from Arsenal to Manchester United, and the full set of club histories is on the football badges hub. The roundel shirts, meanwhile, have already become the collector's oddity of the set.