The Fire are getting a slightly new name. The logo is apparently undergoing a much bigger redesign.
According to an application by Major League Soccer with the United States Patent and Trademark Office dated Nov. 15, the Fire’s official name will be Chicago Fire FC, instead of Chicago Fire Soccer Club. The FC is an apparent nod to the global game.
The team getting a new logo isn’t a surprise, as president/general manager Nelson Rodriguez and owner Joe Mansueto have acknowledged work has been done on the franchise’s identity.
“There’s a team of folks here, talented people looking at that issue,” Mansueto told the Sun-Times in September. “They are towards the end of their process, so I’d like to kind of wait, let that play out. It’s complicated because there’s a lot of pieces to it. It’s not just the name, or even in the name, is it FC, SC, the Fire name? There’s the crest, the logo, so there’s a lot of pieces of it. So if you did want to change something when you move locations, that’s something that I think that is valid to take a look at.”
As for the logo, it is an oval design with CHICAGO on top and FIRE FC on the bottom. In the middle of the oval are six triangles.
The filing only shows the logo in black and white, but the design matches one that popped up last Thursday night on social media. The logo that widely circulated is predominantly blue, with CHICAGO and FIRE FC written in white. The top three triangles are yellow, and the bottom three red.
When that design hit social media, it was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews. Tweets on the #cf97 hashtag used by Fire die-hards have been against the potential new badge, with positive feedback much harder to find.
If the design is the Fire’s new look, it would be their first new logo since the team was established in 1997. For the entirety of their existence, the Fire have worn a badge based on the Florian Cross, symbolic of fire fighters.
The Fire declined to comment.
