Leeds badge history: the white rose, the 2018 crest and the centenary

Leeds badge history is usually told backwards, starting from one extraordinary week in January 2018. Before then the club had been through several designs over the decades; after it, the old shield with the white rose looked untouchable. To understand the modern Leeds crest it helps to start with the day the club tried to replace it.

The shield and the white rose

The badge Leeds supporters defend today is a shield carrying the white rose of Yorkshire and the letters LUFC. It is not an old design by football standards, but it ticks the boxes fans care about: it is clearly Yorkshire, clearly Leeds and clearly theirs.

The rose matters more than any other part. The white rose has been the county's emblem since the days of the House of York, and in a city as conscious of its Yorkshire identity as Leeds, a crest without it was always going to struggle.

The colours follow the kit. Leeds have played in all white since Don Revie changed the strip in the early 1960s, famously borrowing the idea from Real Madrid, with blue and yellow as the accents around it. Any old Leeds badge, whatever its shape, had to sit comfortably on that white shirt.

Older supporters will talk fondly about badges from the Don Revie years and the 1980s. Their exact dates vary from one source to another, though, so this Leeds badge history keeps them out of the timeline rather than guess.

24 January 2018: the Leeds Salute

On 24 January 2018 Leeds United unveiled a new crest built around the Leeds Salute, the chest-thumping gesture fans make at Elland Road. The design was built around that gesture, and it left out the white rose altogether.

The reaction was immediate. A petition against the crest passed 50,000 signatures the same day and later climbed beyond 77,000, a remarkable number for a club playing in the Championship at the time.

The criticism came from several directions. Some simply disliked the drawing. Others objected to the process, since supporters felt they had been presented with a finished design rather than consulted on one. The loudest complaint was simpler still: where was the rose?

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The club retreated within days and asked fans to send in their own ideas instead. By late February it confirmed that any new crest was being pushed back to the 2019/20 season, after receiving around 1,200 submissions from supporters.

The centenary crest of 2019/20

In the end no new crest arrived at all. For the centenary season of 2019/20, Leeds kept the existing shield and changed only the wording, swapping LUFC for "Leeds United 100 years" alongside the date 1919.

It was a neat solution. The shape, the rose and the colours stayed exactly where supporters wanted them, and the anniversary still got its moment on the shirt. Whether the club meant the centenary wording as a one-season special is not clear, but the familiar shield has remained the Leeds crest in the years since.

That season also ended well on the pitch: Leeds won the Championship in 2019/20 and returned to the Premier League for the first time since 2004, so the centenary badge is tied in many memories to promotion.

What the Leeds crest row taught other clubs

The 2018 episode has become a standard example of how not to launch a badge. Everton had already learned the lesson in 2013, when a redesigned crest was replaced after supporters objected, a story told on the Everton badge page. Since Leeds, clubs have tended to consult first: Newcastle put options to a supporter vote before announcing their 2026 redesign, covered on the Newcastle badge page.

Leeds are absent from the original Premier League badge rundown, which covered the clubs of the 2011/12 season, but the first part of that survey, the evolution of Premier League club badges from Arsenal to Manchester United, shows how often other clubs have redrawn their crests. The Manchester City badge is a good contrast: a club that asked supporters before its 2016 change. Every club history sits under football badges.

Leeds fans of the 1990s, meanwhile, can relive the era of the old badge through a different lens in a pictorial study of Carlton Palmer.

The salute is still part of matchday at Elland Road. It just never made it on to the shirt.