A letter from the works, a sports club and a town named after a factory district.

Bayer 04 Leverkusen began with a request from the shop floor. English Wikipedia says that on 27 November 1903 a Bayer employee, Wilhelm Hauschild, wrote to his employer, Friedrich Bayer and Co., asking for the company’s support in starting a sports club, in a letter signed by fellow workers. The company agreed, and on 1 July 1904 the club was founded as a works team, the Turn- und Spielverein of the Bayer paint factories. The “04” in the name comes from that year. A separate football department followed on 31 May 1907.

The works origin is the part of the story that independent coverage keeps returning to. The British newspaper The Independent, in a feature on factory clubs published on 21 February 1993, described Leverkusen as originally the works team of the pharmaceutical group Bayer, and set it alongside PSV Eindhoven and the Peugeot-backed Sochaux as clubs that grew out of companies.

The club and its town share a name for a reason. Wikipedia says that until 1930 the club’s home was Wiesdorf, and Leverkusen was the name of the district where the factories and workers’ housing stood. In 1930 Wiesdorf merged with neighbouring municipalities into a new town, which took the name Leverkusen partly because of the factory’s importance to its growth. From then on the club carried the name of its city as well as its company.

The football side has split from and rejoined its parent several times. Wikipedia records that tension between gymnasts and other athletes led the footballers to form their own association, SV Bayer 04 Leverkusen, on 8 June 1928, while the gymnasts carried on as TuS Bayer 04. The two halves reunited in 1984 as TSV Bayer 04 Leverkusen.

The current structure dates from 1999. German Wikipedia says the professional football department was spun off into Bayer 04 Leverkusen Fußball GmbH on 1 April 1999, with all shares transferred to Bayer AG. English Wikipedia explains that this is possible because Leverkusen and VfL Wolfsburg are exceptions to German football’s 50+1 rule, as works clubs that their companies supported for decades. Bayer AG has owned the football company since 1999, and the club is based in Leverkusen.

From a winged Bergisch lion to the Bayer cross.

The colours came with the footballers. English Wikipedia says that when the football section left the gymnasts in 1928 it took the club’s traditional red and black with it, while the gymnasts later adopted blue and yellow. After the reunion of 1984 the joint club chose red and white, and Wikipedia says that although the football department officially kept black and red, the team played in red and white for about ten years. Red and black are the colours Wikipedia now describes as the main colours of the playing kits and badge.

The badge started out as a company sign. German Wikipedia says that at Christmas 1907 the football team was given an emblem, the Bayer lion with a globe and a caduceus. Derived from the coat of arms of Elberfeld, where the company was founded, it was at the same time the corporate mark of the Bayer paint works: an upright, winged Bergisch lion resting one paw on a globe and holding a staff of Mercury in the other, a reference to the company’s regional roots and its trade with the world market.

The company mark then dropped out and came back. German Wikipedia says that after the footballers split from the gymnasts in the 1920s, the company symbol disappeared from their logo for a time, until the link to the works returned in the name of SV Bayer 04. In May 1936 the Bayer cross, the company mark introduced in 1904, appeared on the players’ shirts, reportedly for a promotion match against Solingen 95, and replaced the lion as the club’s emblem. English Wikipedia also dates the cross on the kit to 1936.

The current crest dates from 1994. German Wikipedia describes it as heraldic in feel: the Bayer cross sits on a round shield, flanked by Bergisch lions acting as supporters. The lions hold a curved banner with the founding year 1904 and stand on a second banner carrying the name Leverkusen. The same source says that after a corporate design programme from 2002 the badge changed in small ways, chiefly the stroke weight and a switch of typeface from Helvetica to Myriad. The Bergisch lion of 1907 has returned in pairs on the modern badge.

Design and documentation.

South American club identities often grew out of a small, fixed set of visual devices that later designers inherit rather than invent. Colours tend to come first: a pair of shades chosen in a club’s early years becomes the base layer for crests, shirts, stadium seating and printed matter, and later redesigns usually work within that pair instead of replacing it. Shirt patterns carry much of the recognition. A diagonal sash cuts across a plain shirt from shoulder to hip and reads clearly at a distance; horizontal hoops wrap the body in alternating bands; vertical stripes divide it into columns. Each pattern behaves differently when reduced to a badge, a scarf or a social-media avatar, so club graphics often simplify the shirt into a few flat shapes. Stadiums add a second vocabulary. Many grounds are known by affectionate nicknames rather than their official names, and those nicknames appear on signage, merchandise and broadcast graphics. Animal mascots form a third layer, often adopted from supporters’ chants or newspaper cartoons before clubs formalised them. For a designer, the useful lesson is how a few durable elements — two colours, one pattern, a nickname and a creature — can carry an identity across generations of kits and media.

Werkself, a stadium renamed and a cross that stayed.

The nicknames grew out of the factory. English Wikipedia says supporters, faced with rivals who dismiss Leverkusen as a club created by a corporate sponsor, have taken to stressing its industrial roots and calling the team the Werkself, “the works eleven”, as well as Pillendreher, “pill twisters”, a nod to Bayer’s pharmaceuticals. German Wikipedia uses Werkself throughout as the everyday name for the team.

The company link also shapes how the name travels. English Wikipedia says that, in view of the club’s works origins, UEFA allows Bayer Leverkusen to use the Bayer brand name in its club competitions, while it does not allow similar naming for clubs such as Red Bull Salzburg, which appears there as FC Salzburg with a modified crest.

The stadium has carried two names. German Wikipedia says ground was broken for the Ulrich-Haberland-Stadion on 23 April 1956 and that it opened in 1958, replacing the old ground Am Stadtpark. Floodlights were added in 1963 for the centenary of Bayer AG, and from 1986 the ground was rebuilt as a fully roofed stadium. Today it is the BayArena. In March 2007 the Bayer AG board approved an expansion, building work ran from December 2007, and during the first half of 2009 the team played its home matches in Düsseldorf while the work was finished in time for the 2009–10 season.

Supporters have defended the factory symbol itself. German Wikipedia says that through an initiative called Das Kreuz muss bleiben, “the cross must stay”, Leverkusen ultras helped prevent the dismantling of the Bayer cross that the company had decided on in 2007. The same mark sits at the centre of the club crest.

For a design guide, Bayer 04 Leverkusen shows how a works club can carry its company mark on the shirt since 1936, swapping a corporate lion for a corporate cross and then bringing the lions back as supporters. Compare it with Bayer Aspirin, which carries the same Bayer cross, and Bundesliga, the league in which the club plays. For this guide we use Werkself red, works black and cross white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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