A chapel cricket team, a gas lamp and a house called Aston Villa.

Aston Villa takes its name from a house. English Wikipedia says the club is believed to have been formed on 21 November 1874 by members of the Aston Villa Wesleyan Chapel in Handsworth, which is now part of Birmingham. The chapel stood at Villa Cross, a road junction whose name came from a suburban Georgian villa known as Aston Villa; over time the house had given its name to the surrounding locality, and the locality gave it to the chapel and then to the football club.

The founders came from a cricket team. Wikipedia names them as Jack Hughes, George Matthews, Walter Price and William Scattergood, members of the chapel’s cricket side who were looking for a way to stay fit through the winter months. Having watched a fellow member of their Bible class play in a rugby match, they are said to have paused beneath a dim gas lamp near Villa Cross and agreed that rugby was a little too rough, deciding to play association football instead. Wikipedia says the meeting under the gas lamp is traditionally regarded as the birth of the club, and a shield inspired by that lamp was one of the two crest designs put to supporters in 2022.

The early matches were improvised. With few local football teams to play, Wikipedia says, the club’s opening game was against a local rugby side, Aston Brook St Mary’s, and as a condition of the fixture Villa agreed to play the first half under rugby rules and the second under association rules. In 1876 a young Scot, George Ramsay, came across a Villa practice match in Aston Park, was asked to make up the numbers, and was invited to become captain. He also took charge of training and introduced a passing game influenced by the Glasgow club Queen’s Park.

The grounds moved as the club grew. Wikipedia says Villa played in Aston Park from 1874 to 1876 and at Wellington Road from 1876 to 1897, before moving to Villa Park, which has been the club’s home since 1897. In 2022 the club announced plans to rebuild the North Stand and part of the Trinity Road stand. The training ground at Bodymoor Heath, near Kingsbury in north Warwickshire, was bought by the then chairman Doug Ellis from a local farmer in the early 1970s; it was redeveloped in two phases in the 2000s, and the new facility was officially unveiled on 6 May 2007.

The name has stayed constant through all of this. The full title, Aston Villa Football Club, and the initials AVFC have been carried on badges, programmes and stadium signage, and the club’s crest designs have alternated between spelling out the initials and spelling out the full name. The rampant lion that sits at the centre of those badges has a separate history, which runs back to the club’s Scottish captains of the 1880s.

Hoops, a Scottish lion, chocolate and sky blue, and a crest that keeps changing shape.

Villa’s colours went through several versions before claret and blue. Wikipedia says the club’s uniform at the outset was royal blue caps and stockings, royal blue and scarlet hooped jerseys and white knickerbockers, and that a club rule stated that no member could take part in a match without wearing it. Between 1877 and 1879 the team wore a run of different kits, from all white to blue and black, red and blue, and plain green.

The lion arrived with two Scots. By 1880, Wikipedia says, William McGregor and George Ramsay had introduced black jerseys with a Scottish lion rampant embroidered on the chest, and that strip remained the first-choice kit for six years. On 8 November 1886 an entry in the club’s minute book recorded a proposal that the colours be chocolate and sky blue shirts, with Mr McGregor asked to supply two dozen at the lowest quotation. The chocolate later became claret. Wikipedia says nobody is quite sure why claret and blue were adopted. The home kit today is a claret shirt with sky blue sleeves, white shorts with claret and blue trim, and sky blue socks with claret and white trim. Other clubs also play in claret and blue, among them West Ham United.

The rampant lion has led the modern badges. A new crest revealed in May 2007, for which the owner Randy Lerner asked fans to help with the design, set the lion on a light blue background, added a star for the club’s 1982 European Cup, kept the traditional motto “Prepared” and shortened the name to AVFC. Wikipedia says the lion became a single unified figure, in place of the fragmented lions of earlier badges.

The next version came from a London studio. The Drum reported on 8 April 2016 that Aston Villa had engaged the London design agency SomeOne to update the club badge and build a wider set of brand assets. Fans asked about the existing design said the lion did not capture the club’s heritage, and the lack of claws on the lion was something they mentioned specifically. Working with an artist and engraver, SomeOne drew a larger and more detailed lion. Because focus groups had pointed out that the word “Prepared” made the lion smaller, the motto was removed so that the lion and the AVFC initials could sit larger within the shield. The Drum said SomeOne also created a brand tool kit with a set of claw-inspired icons and a bespoke primary typeface, and that the updated badge would appear on the shirt from the start of the 2016–17 season.

Then the shield became a circle, and later a shield again. In November 2022, following a fan vote, the club announced a new crest for the following season. The agency Dragon Rouge, which ran the consultation, says season-ticket holders and members were offered two concepts, a round badge and a shield based on the founding gas lamp, and that the chosen round design rotated the lion to face forward and echoed the circular badge worn in 1982. Wikipedia says the club’s president of business operations, Chris Heck, later clarified that the round crest would be used only on playing kits and training wear. The Aston Villa Supporters’ Trust wrote on 6 January 2024 that the club had revisited the crest the previous October with a second survey, and that the Fan Advisory Board had contacted the Football Association with concerns about the level of consultation. Footy Headlines reported on 31 May 2024 that the club had revealed a new shield-shaped crest with the yellow lion of the 2016 design, the full club name and the founding year, replacing the round badge worn on the 2023–24 shirts, and that the club said it had consulted the FA throughout the process.

Clubs, crests and colours.

English club crests draw on a small set of visual sources. Some borrow directly from heraldry, with rampant lions, shields, mottoes and stars arranged in the manner of a coat of arms. Others take an animal associated with a club’s nickname, such as a fox, a bird or a hammer-bearing figure, and render it as a simple silhouette. Many lean on the arms of the town or city the club represents, adapting towers, ships, rivers or civic symbols into a badge that can sit on a shirt, a programme cover or a stadium wall.

Crests change over time. Clubs redraw them to work at small sizes, on screens and on merchandise, to simplify fine detail, or to register a mark as a trademark. A redesign can be contentious, because supporters often treat the badge as part of their own identity, and several clubs now run fan consultations, surveys or supporter panels before a new crest is adopted. Some redesigns have been revised or withdrawn after supporters objected.

Shirt sponsorship sits alongside the crest on the kit. Sponsor names, kit-maker logos and sleeve partners appear on the front of the shirt, and they change far more often than the badge itself, which is one reason the crest and club colours carry so much of a club’s visual continuity.

A Birmingham chairman, an American owner, a Chinese buyer and an Egyptian-American partnership.

Villa’s ownership has moved from scattered shareholders to single owners and then to investment groups. Wikipedia says shares in the club were issued towards the end of the 19th century, when legislation required professional teams to distribute shares to investors, and that trading in them continued for much of the 20th century until Doug Ellis began buying up shares in the 1960s. Ellis was chairman and a substantial shareholder from 1968 to 1975 and the majority shareholder from 1982 to 2006, and the club was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1996.

An American owner followed. Wikipedia says Randy Lerner, then owner of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, agreed a takeover on 14 August 2006 and took full control on 18 September 2006, appointing himself chairman and naming Ellis chairman emeritus. Lerner put the club up for sale in May 2014, and in May 2016 agreed to sell it to Recon Group, owned by the Chinese businessman Tony Xia; the sale was completed on 14 June 2016 after approval by the Football League.

The present owners arrived in 2018. Wikipedia says that on 20 July 2018 it was announced that NSWE Group, a consortium of the Egyptian businessman Nassef Sawiris and the American investor Wes Edens, would invest in the club and take a controlling stake, with Sawiris becoming chairman. The group is now known as V Sports. Companies House filings published in August 2019 showed that Xia’s remaining shares had been bought out. In December 2023 the club announced that the American investment firm Atairos would take a minority stake in V Sports, and the deal was finalised on 12 April 2024. NSWE, now V Sports, has controlled Aston Villa since 2018.

The commercial names on the shirt have changed far more often than the lion. Wikipedia says local manufacturers produced Villa’s kit until 1974, when Umbro put its logo on a Villa shirt, and that shirt sponsorship began with Davenports Breweries in the 1982–83 season. In 2008–09 and 2009–10 the club carried the name of Acorns Children’s Hospice on its shirts instead of a commercial sponsor; Acorns then became the club’s official charity partner. A sleeve sponsor appeared for the 2019–20 season, and in August 2025 the club named Red Bull its official energy drink partner.

For a design guide, Aston Villa shows how a club can redraw, reshape and re-letter its badge several times while the same rampant lion and the same claret and sky blue carry the identity, and how fan consultation now shapes each change. Compare the Premier League, the competition Villa returned to in 2019, and West Ham United, which also plays in claret and blue. For this guide we use claret, sky blue and lion yellow with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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