A vacancy in the market, a name that started as a placeholder, and a crowd at Union Station.

LAFC began with a vacancy. English Wikipedia says Major League Soccer awarded a new expansion team to Los Angeles on 30 October 2014, after the dissolution of Chivas USA, the club that had shared the LA Galaxy’s stadium in Carson. The new team was to begin play in 2018.

The name was there from the start, though only as a stand-in. Wikipedia says “Los Angeles Football Club” was used as a placeholder while the club was being organised, and on 15 September 2015 it was confirmed as the official name. Henry Nguyen, the principal owner at the time, had hinted at the decision shortly after the club was announced, describing the name as “timeless.” In everyday use it is shortened to LAFC, and the club and its supporters refer to themselves as the Black & Gold.

The colours were not what everyone expected. Sports Illustrated reported on 7 January 2016 that the club had unveiled its colours and crest at a ceremony at Los Angeles’s Union Station, and that anyone expecting a black and red identity, based on the club’s earlier announcements, would be surprised: the colours were black and gold. Nguyen, then majority owner, told the magazine that a “flash” of red would still be part of the look.

The launch was also an ownership announcement. ESPN reported the same day that the actor Will Ferrell and Brandon Beck, the co-founder and chief executive of Riot Games, had been introduced at the Union Station event as new part-owners. At the time, ESPN said, the club was owned by Vincent Tan and Henry Nguyen, with Magic Johnson, Peter Guber, Tony Robbins, Mia Hamm and Nomar Garciaparra among the minority partners. Members of the supporters’ group Black Army 1850, originally associated with Chivas USA, were in the crowd, and the club president, Tom Penn, told ESPN that part-owner Larry Berg, whose children played on the same soccer team as Ferrell’s, had brought the actor in.

The club’s ownership has since been reorganised. Wikipedia now lists Brandon Beck, Larry Berg and Bennett Rosenthal as managing owners, with a group of part-owners that includes Ferrell, Garciaparra, Hamm, Johnson and Giorgio Chiellini. The team played its opening MLS match on 4 March 2018, away to Seattle Sounders FC.

A city seal for an outline, Richard Neutra for the letters, and a wing with four blades.

The crest is built from civic references. Wikipedia describes an Art Deco-inspired logo with a shield outline that references the city seal, a winged “LA” monogram, and the words “Los Angeles” and “Football Club” set in Neutraface. Sports Illustrated described the same mark in January 2016 as a crest with the initials L.A. and a wing forming the horizontal stroke of the A, a nod to the City of Angels.

The club explained the symbolism at the launch. LAFC said in its announcement of 7 January 2016 that the outline of the crest was derived from the Seal of the City of Los Angeles, that the wing represents the City of Angels and stands for power and mobility, and that four blades on the wing represent the pillars of the club and the city’s founding on 4 September 1781. The club said the lettering was Art Deco-inspired as a nod to the architecture of Downtown Los Angeles from the city’s expansion in the 1920s; the league’s own report that day identified the typeface as Neutraface, based on the signage of the architect Richard Neutra.

Colour names came with the crest. According to the league’s launch report, Pitch Black and California Gold colour the crest and are meant to evoke the success, urban texture and glamour of Los Angeles; a flash of Glory Red represents the club’s home in the heart of the city, with Asphalt and Wolff Gray as complements. Wikipedia summarises the scheme as black and gold primaries with red and grey accents.

The design team is named in the record. Wikipedia credits the crest to Thai Nguyen and the creative team of Tue Nguyen and Matthew Wolff, and the design review site Brand New headed its 11 January 2016 post on the mark “New Logo for Los Angeles Football Club by Tue Nguyen and Matthew Wolff.” The club said the design had come out of extensive planning and dialogue with supporters, and Wikipedia says fans were consulted on the team colours, the look of the crest and the design of the stadium.

The identity extends to live birds. Wikipedia says the club’s falcon programme has three falcons that appear at match-day and community events; one is released before games by an honorary falconer and flies around the stadium, and Ferrell was the original holder of that role. The falcons are named after Los Angeles streets: Olly for Olvera Street, Fig for Figueroa Street and Mel for Melrose Avenue.

Clubs, crests and colours.

North American soccer clubs build their identities from a small set of recurring parts: a crest, a pair or trio of colours, a wordmark, and the supporter scarf that carries all three into the stands. Crests in the league tend to favour simple outlines, such as shields, circles and roundels, that can be stitched onto a shirt, printed on a ticket and shown at small size on a phone screen without losing their shape. Colour choices often borrow from a city’s landscape, history or older sports teams, and clubs often give their main shade its own name in brand materials.

Scarves sit at the centre of supporter culture. Fan groups commission their own designs, hold them aloft during anthems, and use banners, flags and choreographed displays to turn a stand into a large-scale graphic surface. Many clubs share stadiums with football, baseball or other tenants, so signage, seat colours and temporary dressing must switch between teams from one week to the next. Expansion launches add another layer: a new club usually reveals its name, crest and colours months before its first match, often after supporter consultation, and the reveal itself becomes a design event.

A stadium on the Sports Arena site, a 3,252-place end, and a rivalry named after traffic.

LAFC chose to play close to downtown. Wikipedia says that on 17 May 2015 the club picked the site of the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in Exposition Park for a soccer-specific stadium, under a sublease from the University of Southern California, which managed the arena and the neighbouring Coliseum. The Los Angeles City Council approved the project on 6 May 2016, ground was broken on 23 August 2016, and the old arena was demolished by October that year.

The stadium has carried two sponsor names. It opened as Banc of California Stadium, hosted an open practice and dedication ceremony on 18 April 2018 and staged LAFC’s opening home match on 29 April 2018, against Seattle Sounders FC. Wikipedia says it was renamed BMO Stadium on 19 January 2023. Since 2022 it has also been the home of the NWSL club Angel City FC, in which LAFC holds a minority stake. The club trains at the LAFC Performance Center on the campus of California State University, Los Angeles.

The supporters have their own numbers. Wikipedia says the club’s fans are known collectively as The 3252, after the official capacity of the safe-standing supporters’ section in the North End of the stadium; the digits add up to 12, a reference to the “12th man.” The 3252 is an independent supporters’ union that brings together groups including the Black Army 1850 and the District Nine Ultras, and its chants are sung in English, Spanish and Korean, among them “Dale, Dale Black & Gold.”

The rivalry is named after the commute. Wikipedia says LAFC’s matches against the LA Galaxy in Carson are called El Tráfico, a nickname coined by MLS fans that plays on El Clásico and on the city’s traffic congestion.

Shirt sponsors have changed with the club’s media deals. Wikipedia says YouTube TV became the club’s shirt sponsor in January 2018, and the German power-tool maker Flex replaced it in March 2021. The club plays in the Western Conference of MLS.

For a design guide, LAFC shows how a new club can build an identity from the city’s civic and architectural record, using the seal for its outline and Neutra’s lettering for its words. Compare the Los Angeles Dodgers, another Los Angeles team with a script-and-colour identity, and the LA Galaxy, its cross-town rival. For this guide we use pitch black, California gold and glory red with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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