A parish side, three names and a change of colour.

Manchester City began as a church team. English Wikipedia says the club was founded in 1880 as St. Mark’s (West Gorton), became Ardwick Association Football Club in 1887, and took the name Manchester City in 1894. Its history pages trace the origin to St. Mark’s Church in Gorton, where the rector, Arthur Connell, and the church wardens William Beastow, Thomas Goodbehere and James Moores had set up a young men’s association in the 1870s. The first recorded match of the football side was played on 13 November 1880 against a church team from Macclesfield.

The name changed as the club moved away from the parish. Wikipedia says that after a short merger with a neighbouring side in the mid-1880s, the St. Mark’s players named themselves Gorton Association F.C., and the church title faded into parentheses. The club joined the Football League in 1892 as Ardwick, and the Manchester City name followed two years later.

The early shirts were not blue. Wikipedia says reports from 1884 describe the team in black jerseys bearing a white cross, a reminder of its church beginnings, and a booklet published in the 1940s says West Gorton originally played in scarlet and black. The club has worn blue since 1892 or earlier, and it adopted the sky blue home shirts it is known for in 1894, the first season under the current name. Wikipedia gives the home colours today as sky blue and white.

The away strip carries a story of its own. Wikipedia says the traditional change colours were maroon, and from the 1960s red and black. The red and black stripes came from the assistant manager Malcolm Allison, who believed that adopting the colours of AC Milan would inspire the team, and the club wore them in several cup finals around 1969 and 1970. The combination has returned at intervals since, alongside a wider range of colours in recent seasons.

The grounds moved east over time. After playing at five sites between 1880 and 1887, Wikipedia says the club settled at Hyde Road, its home for 36 years. A fire destroyed the main stand in 1920, and in 1923 the club moved to the purpose-built Maine Road in Moss Side. In 2003 it moved to the City of Manchester Stadium in east Manchester, which it holds on a long lease from Manchester City Council and which has carried the name Etihad Stadium since 2011.

A ship, three rivers, a rose, an eagle, and back to a circle.

For decades City wore no badge on ordinary match shirts. Wikipedia says that when the club reached a major cup final, the players wore shirts bearing the City of Manchester coat of arms, as a sign of pride in representing the city, a practice that dated from a time when shirts normally carried no badge at all. For the 2011 FA Cup final the club used its usual badge with a special legend, and the city arms appeared as a small monochrome mark in the shirt numbers.

The first shirt badge was round. Wikipedia says it was introduced in 1970, based on designs used on club documents since the mid-1960s: a shield bearing a ship, taken from the city’s arms, inside a circle carrying the club’s name. In 1972 a variation replaced the lower half of the shield with the red rose of Lancashire. In 1976 the College of Arms granted a heraldic badge to the Football League for City’s use, with the ship above a red rose on a circular device.

In 1997 the club changed shape. Wikipedia says the earlier badge was ineligible for registration as a trademark, so a new design based on the arms of the city was adopted: a shield in front of a golden eagle, an old heraldic symbol of Manchester. The shield showed a ship for the Manchester Ship Canal and three diagonal stripes for the city’s rivers, the Irwell, the Irk and the Medlock. The motto “Superbia in Proelio,” Latin for “Pride in Battle,” ran along the bottom, and three stars sat above the eagle for decoration.

Fans were asked to choose what came next. The Guardian reported on 24 November 2015 that, after a consultation with supporters, the club would replace the 1997 eagle with a design that returned to the round shape of its two predecessors, in line with the round badges of New York City FC and Melbourne City, which belong to the same group. Wikipedia says the consultation had been announced on 16 October 2015, and that a version of the design surfaced two days early after it was trademarked on 22 December.

The new crest was revealed before the home match against Sunderland on 26 December 2015. The Guardian reported that day that it kept the gold ship, the three diagonal stripes for the Irwell, Medlock and Irk and the red rose of Lancashire, added the year 1894, and dropped the eagle, the three gold stars and the Latin motto. It went on the team’s shirts from the 2016–17 season.

Clubs, crests and colours.

A football club’s identity is usually built from a small set of parts that supporters learn to read at a glance. The crest sits at the centre: a shield, roundel or monogram that may carry a city emblem, a founding year, a letter cipher or an animal. Crests are redrawn every few decades, often to simplify detail for screens, embroidery and small sizes, and each redraw tends to prompt debate among supporters about what should be kept.

Colour pairs carry as much weight as the crest. Two colours, set as vertical stripes, hoops, halves or a plain shirt with contrasting trim, can identify a club from the far side of a stadium. Kit makers interpret those colours each season, adding their own marks on the chest and sleeves, so a club’s look is always shared between its own badge and a manufacturer’s logo.

Beyond the official marks, supporters add a third layer: banners, flags and choreographies painted in club colours, with hand-made lettering that often echoes the crest. For a design guide, the useful lesson is how few elements carry the whole identity, and how carefully each one is protected.

A listed club, a Thai owner, and an Abu Dhabi group.

The club passed through two takeovers in two years. Wikipedia says Manchester City had been listed on the PLUS market since 1995 before the former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, through UK Sports Investments, took control and returned it to private ownership in 2007. On 1 September 2008, Wikipedia says, Abu Dhabi United Group completed its takeover, and The Guardian, reporting the 2015 crest change, described the group as Sheikh Mansour’s. The Guardian reported in September 2026 that Khaldoon Al Mubarak has chaired the board since days after that takeover.

The owners built a group around the club. Wikipedia says City Football Group was created in the 2013–14 season to manage the Abu Dhabi group’s football interests, holding stakes in clubs in other countries; New York City FC and Melbourne City are two of them, and The Guardian reported that the 2015 redesign brought City’s badge in line with theirs. The Guardian reported on 26 September 2026 that an independent commission had found against the club on almost all of the Premier League’s charges over financial rules.

The kit has changed makers often. Wikipedia lists Umbro from 1974 to 1997, Kappa, Le Coq Sportif, Reebok, Le Coq Sportif again, and Umbro from 2009 to 2013, then Nike from 2013 to 2019 and Puma since 2019. Shirt sponsors began with Saab in 1982 and continued with Philips, Brother, Eidos, First Advice and Thomas Cook before Etihad Airways arrived in 2009; the airline’s name has been on the shirt front, and on the stadium, ever since.

The stadium has grown with the identity. Wikipedia says the club lowered the pitch and built a new North Stand when it converted the City of Manchester Stadium for football, added a third tier to the South Stand for the 2015–16 season, and opened an expanded North Stand at the end of the 2025–26 season. The club competes in the Premier League.

For a design guide, Manchester City shows how a club can move from city arms to an eagle and back to a circle, and keep the same ship, rivers and rose throughout. Compare Manchester United, whose crest also draws on the city’s ship, and Chelsea FC, which also returned to an older badge. For this guide we use sky blue, crest navy and ship gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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