Creating an identity for an entire football league is a more delicate job than it might first appear.
It has to feel recognisable without overpowering the clubs beneath it, and distinctive enough to work across everything from social media to a live substitution graphic. With its new work for the Belgian Pro League, SOCIETAS has found a smart answer: build the initial structure and let the clubs deliver the personality.
Developed alongside the Pro League team, the new identity brings Belgium’s men’s and women’s competitions, esports division and Hall of Fame into one coherent visual system. Rather than looking at the setup as various separate entities, the Munich-based creative studio has crafted a shared framework capable of moving across the full breadth of Belgian professional football.
At its centre is a refined new logo and a variable typeface designed specifically for the league. The latter gives the Pro League its own typographic voice and enough flexibility to work at different scales – whether filling a stadium screen or delivering information within the tighter confines of a broadcast graphic. That flexibility also carries into a completely reimagined animation package covering every onscreen moment, from team line-ups and live substitutions to the wider suite of graphics used throughout a match.
The most considered decision is the absence of colour. The core system remains deliberately black and white, allowing the identities of Belgium’s individual clubs to occupy the foreground. As SOCIETAS co-founder, Nils Unterharnscheidt, explains: "A league brand has to hold every club’s identity without competing with any of them. That’s why the core of the system is black and white and typographic. The colour comes from the clubs."
A restrained approach, sure, but not an unexpected one from SOCIETAS, whose work sits between strategy, identity, product and production, with football culture providing the red thread that connects it all.
In a relatively short period, the studio has worked with TSV 1860 München, VfL Bochum, BSC Young Boys, Aalborg BK and FC Augsburg, producing everything from special-edition shirts to lifestyle collections. Its more expansive identity work has included projects for VfB Stuttgart and Werder Bremen, where the latter's famous diamond crest was left untouched while the wider visual world around it was rebuilt through typography, colour, pattern and motion.
The Pro League represents a different scale of challenge. This is not one club with one history, but a collection of institutions, competitions and audiences that all need their own room to survive. Thus, SOCIETAS has created the common visual language through which each can speak more clearly. The result is an identity that feels present: one system for Belgian professional football, with enough thought to know when to step back.