Burnley badge history: storks, bees, a cypher and the claret crest

Burnley badge history is a story of coming back. The club has worn its town's arms, a script badge, a cypher and several versions of a stork-and-bees crest, and it has shown a rare willingness to bring an old Burnley badge out of retirement whenever the moment suits. Even now, the latest away kit has dusted off a crest first seen in 1979. Most clubs treat a crest change as a one-way door; at Turf Moor it has been more of a revolving one.

The town arms: stork, knot, bees and the Brun

Burnley wore the arms of the town on their shirts for the first time in 1935. Like most civic heraldry it packed a lot of local history into a small space, and almost all of it has survived into the modern Burnley crest.

• A stork, from the arms of the Starkie family, a local landowning name.
• The de Lacy knot, a reminder of the medieval lords of the area.
• Bees, scattered across the shield.
• A chevron representing the River Brun, which gave Burnley its name.
• Cotton, for the mills that built the town.

The town's 1862 arms also carried the Latin motto "Pretiumque et causa laboris", usually translated as "both the prize and the motive of labour". It is a very Lancashire sentiment.

Script, crest and cypher: the old Burnley badges

In 1969 the club dropped the arms in favour of a script badge, part of a wider move by English clubs towards simpler designs that could be printed and embroidered cheaply.

A new crest followed in 1979. It is the one that matters most to supporters of a certain age, because it was worn twice: from 1979 to 1983, and then again from 1987/88 all the way to 2009. In between, from 1983, the club wore a simple cypher.

That second spell covers some of the most dramatic years in the club's story. In 1987 Burnley needed to beat Orient on the final day to avoid dropping out of the Football League; they won 2–1 at Turf Moor and survived. The crest came back to the shirt the following season and stayed through the long climb that followed.

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2009 and 2010: a Premier League crest with a past

When Burnley reached the Premier League for the first time in 2009, the club marked it by bringing back a crest from the 1959/60 era. That was the season Burnley were champions of England, so the choice linked the newest chapter in the club's history to its greatest.

A year later, in 2010, the crest stayed but the wording changed. The Latin legend on the scroll was replaced by the words "Burnley Football Club". Exactly which Latin text the club scroll carried before that has not been confirmed by a reliable source, so it is not stated here. Claims that the club once used the phrase "Hoc Age" have no source at all.

The Burnley crest since 2023

In June 2023, ahead of a return to the Premier League, Burnley made a one-colour version of the crest, white on claret, the primary badge. Every element stayed the same, and the change was rolled out quietly rather than launched. A single colour suits modern needs: it embroiders cleanly, prints sharply on a phone screen and sits as comfortably on a training top as on the stands at Turf Moor, where Burnley have played since 1883.

Then, for 2026/27, the 1979 design came back once more, this time in a tonal version on the away kit. For a club that has spent more than four decades rotating between a handful of designs, it felt entirely in character.

Claret and blue tie Burnley to several other clubs, most obviously West Ham and Aston Villa, whose crests are covered on the West Ham badge and Aston Villa badge pages. Fellow promoted sides have had their own redesigns, too: compare the Bournemouth badge and the Sheffield United badge.

Burnley were in the Championship in 2011, so they did not feature in the original survey of Premier League crests, but the evolution of Premier League club badges from Arsenal to Manchester United shows how their neighbours changed. Every club history is gathered under football badges.

Supporters who kept their 1979 crest shirts have been proved right twice now.