Southampton badge history: halo, tree and a crest by supporters

The Southampton badge is one of the few in the top flight that was designed by a supporter rather than a committee or an agency. In 1974 the club ran a competition among its fans, and the winning entry, first used for the 1974/75 season, is still recognisably the crest the Saints wear today: a halo, a tree, water, a white rose, a football and a scarf. In a period when clubs redraw their badges every few years, that kind of continuity is rare.

Each symbol on the Southampton crest refers to something specific about the club or the city, which makes it one of the easiest to read in English football.

A crest designed in a supporters' competition

Fan competitions were a popular way to choose a badge in the early 1970s. Nottingham Forest ran one through the local evening paper in 1973 and ended up with their famous tree, and the Nottingham Forest badge has hardly changed since either. Southampton followed a year later.

The name of the winning designer appears in some accounts, but no reliable source confirms it, so the credit here goes to the supporters' competition itself. What matters more is how well the design has lasted. It made an unpromising start. Southampton were relegated from the First Division in 1974, in the same season as Manchester United, so the new badge first appeared on a side playing second-tier football. Two years after it arrived, Southampton won the 1976 FA Cup, beating those same Manchester United 1–0 at Wembley while still a Second Division side. The club moved from The Dell to St Mary's Stadium in 2001, and the badge moved with it unchanged in its essentials.

Every symbol on the Southampton crest

Read from the top, the crest tells a short history of the club and its city.

• The halo: Southampton were founded in 1885 by members of St Mary's Church, which is where "the Saints" comes from. Few crests put a club's founding story so literally on the shirt.
• The tree: the New Forest, just to the west of the city.
• The water: the docks and Southampton's long maritime history as one of Britain's great ports.
• The white rose: the Hampshire rose, taken from the civic arms.
• The ball and scarf: football itself, and the supporters who wear the colours.

The colours are the shirt colours, red and white.

AI

The 125th anniversary crest of 2010/11

The one real break in the Southampton badge history came in 2010/11, the club's 125th season. For that campaign only, the crest was given a gold frame, the dates "1885–2010" and the number "125" on the ball. It was a commemorative piece, not a return to any older style, and it ran for a single season.

Anniversary crests were something of a fashion around that time. Arsenal wore one for their 125th in 2011/12, and Leicester City had a one-season version for 2009/10. Southampton's now makes 2010/11 shirts easy to date: any Saints top with a gold-framed badge belongs to that one season in League One, which ended in promotion.

Why the old Southampton badge never went away

In 2011 the club went back to its standard design, cleaned up rather than replaced. No confirmed redesign has followed since. That means the old Southampton badge and the current one are, for most practical purposes, the same crest, which is a strange thing to say about a club whose fortunes since 2010 have swung from League One to more than a decade in the Premier League and back to the Championship.

Along the south coast, rivals have taken a different approach. The Brighton & Hove Albion badge changed to a roundel in 2011 for the move to the Amex, and the AFC Bournemouth badge was revised in 2013/14. Southampton stayed put. They had less reason to move than most: their ground, St Mary's, carries the same name as the church that gave the club its halo, so the badge and the stadium tell the same story.

The full set of club histories is on the football badges hub, and the wider story of the clubs from Newcastle onwards is in the evolution of Premier League club badges from Newcastle United to Wolverhampton Wanderers. Fifty-two seasons on, the crest a supporter drew in 1974 has outlasted The Dell and every fashion in football design since.