A dinner-table charity, a two-nation name and a shirt that changed twice.

Celtic was set up to raise money. English Wikipedia says the club was formally constituted on 6 November 1887 at a meeting in St Mary’s church hall in Calton, in Glasgow’s East End, by the Marist Brother Walfrid. Its purpose was to fund the Poor Children’s Dinner Table, a charity Walfrid had started, and the idea was largely inspired by Hibernian in Edinburgh, which had been formed a few years earlier.

The name was chosen at the same meeting. Wikipedia says Walfrid suggested Celtic, pronounced “Seltik,” to reflect the club’s Irish and Scottish roots. The nickname followed later: the club press office says the new team was known to many as “the bold boys,” and an early twentieth-century postcard reading “The Bould Bhoys” is the earliest known use of the spelling the Bhoys. The extra h imitates Gaelic spelling, where the letter b is often followed by an h.

Celtic played its first official match on 28 May 1888, a friendly against Rangers. The club became a private limited company in 1897, with Willie Maley appointed secretary-manager.

The hoops were not there at the start. Wikipedia says the original strip was a white shirt with a green collar, black shorts, and black and green hooped socks. The shirt carried the Marist Brothers’ badge on the right-hand side: a green cross inside a red circle. In 1889 the club changed to green and white vertical stripes, which lasted for fourteen years while the shorts alternated between white and black. The shirt had no crest in that period.

Then came the pattern that names the team. Celtic adopted green and white hooped shirts in 1903, Wikipedia says, and wore them for the first time on 15 August 1903 against Partick Thistle. Black socks continued until the early 1930s, when green socks took over; plain white socks arrived in the mid-1960s and have been the usual colour since. The hoops gave the club another name, the Hoops, and have stayed on the home shirt ever since.

The hoops also shaped how numbers were worn. Wikipedia says the chairman Robert Kelly objected to the pattern being broken up, so Celtic wore numbers on the players’ shorts. That lasted until 1994, when the Scottish Football League instructed the club to put numbers on the shirts; Celtic first tried the tops of the sleeves before being ordered to place them on the back, on a white patch across the hoops.

A four-leaf clover in a ring of words, and a run of anniversary badges.

Celtic’s badge is a plant, not a cross. Wikipedia says the club began using a badge in the 1930s: a four-leaf clover surrounded by the formal company name, “The Celtic Football and Athletic Coy. Ltd.” It did not go on the shirt for decades.

The clover reached the shirt in 1977. For the playing kit the outer ring was reversed out, with white lettering on a green background, and the wording around the clover was shortened to “The Celtic Football Club.”

Anniversaries have produced special versions. For the club’s centenary in 1988, Wikipedia says, a commemorative crest was worn featuring the cross that had appeared on the first shirts; the 1977 version returned for the 1989–90 season. To mark the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 European Cup final, a special crest was introduced for the 2007–08 season, and the star added for it was kept when the usual crest came back the following season.

The 125th anniversary in 2012 brought a retro kit designed by Nike with narrower hoops, and a special crest with a Celtic knot pattern embroidered around the traditional badge. A third strip based on the 1888 original was adopted for that season. All the kits for 2017–18 paid tribute to the 1967 team, the Lisbon Lions, with a line on each side of the shirt representing the handles of the European Cup and a commemorative crest designed for that season only; the regular crest came back the year after, while the away strip again carried a cross as a reference to the club’s first shirts.

Sponsors came late and were sometimes absent. Wikipedia says Celtic first carried a shirt sponsor in 1984, the double-glazing firm CR Smith, switched to the Glasgow car dealer Peoples for 1991–92, and played the 1992–93 season in unsponsored hoops before CR Smith returned.

Clubs, crests and colours.

Football club identities tend to be built from a small set of recurring parts, and each part carries its own design job. A motto, often written in Latin or in the club’s home language, is usually set on a ribbon or band around the crest, where it has to stay legible at the size of a phone screen as well as on a stadium façade.

Animal emblems are another common device. A bird, a big cat or a mythical creature gives a club a mascot, a nickname and a shape that can be drawn as a full heraldic figure, a flat silhouette or a costumed character on matchdays. The same animal may appear in several drawings at once, each tuned to a different medium.

Stadium names work as a second brand. Some grounds carry a historic place name, some honour a person and some are sold to a sponsor for a fixed term, which changes the signage, the wordmark and the way broadcasters refer to the venue. Kit sponsors add a third layer: a shirt front shared with a partner’s logo means the club’s colours and crest have to hold their own beside another company’s mark, season after season.

Parkhead, a 1994 takeover, and three kit makers in fifteen years.

The ground is in the East End where the club began. Wikipedia says Celtic opened the original Celtic Park in the Parkhead area in 1888 and moved to a different site nearby in 1892 when the rent was raised sharply. The new site became an oval stadium with large terraces, covered and floodlit between 1957 and 1971. Fans call it Parkhead or Paradise. After the Taylor Report, the old terraces were demolished in a phased rebuild that was completed in August 1998; Celtic spent the 1994–95 season at Hampden Park while work went on.

Ownership stayed with a few families until the 1990s. Wikipedia says the shareholdings of the Grant, Kelly and White families dominated the club through the twentieth century. That ended on 4 March 1994, when the Canadian-based businessman Fergus McCann took control, turned the club into a public limited company, Celtic PLC, and oversaw the rebuilding of the stadium. After McCann sold his stake in 1999, the Irish businessman Dermot Desmond became the majority shareholder, Wikipedia says. The club’s training centre at Lennoxtown opened in October 2007.

The kit has changed hands several times. Umbro supplied the shirts from the 1930s until 2005, when Celtic moved to Nike, Wikipedia says; New Balance followed from the start of the 2015–16 season. STV News reported on 13 March 2020 that Celtic had agreed a five-year partnership with Adidas starting in July that year, covering both the men’s and women’s squads, with the German company making first-team kit, training wear and replica shirts in place of New Balance.

The club has its own paper too. Wikipedia says the club newspaper, The Celtic View, was set up in the 1960s by Jack McGinn, who later became commercial manager and then chairman.

Celtic competes in Scotland’s top division and in European competition, including the UEFA Champions League.

For a design guide, Celtic FC shows how a shirt pattern can give a club its nickname, and how anniversary crests can come and go around a fixed clover. Compare Rangers FC, the Glasgow neighbour whose scroll monogram sits on royal blue, and Liverpool FC, whose Liver Bird crest is set on all red. For this guide we use hoop green, hoop white and star gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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