via VerdeVan.com
- New MLS team Austin FC has revealed it’s latest batch of fan merchandise.
- Most of the text on the new merchandise is Spanish wording.
- Austin FC is the second team in America’s major sports leagues to use Spanish in its main branding.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
New MLS team Austin FC is taking a fresh design approach by featuring Spanish as the predominant language for its branding.
Austin, Texas, where the team is based, has a vast Spanish-speaking community. Hispanics or Latinos make up nearly 34% of the city’s population, according to the US census. Spanish is a heavily prominent language in Austin and many of its surrounding Texas communities, as 11 cities in Texas have more Spanish than English speakers, making up half of the nation’s total cities with that language ratio.
“Our mission is to represent Austin in everything we do,” Austin FC marketing lead James Ruth told Insider. “There’s multiple components to this community, and I think for us in our efforts to best reflect all of Austin, having Spanish play a role and how we talk about the club just made sense.”
—Austin FC (@AustinFC) January 28, 2021
Ruth said that the identity the club has adopted has already resonated strongly with Austin locals, even those who aren’t soccer fans. However, Ruth claims he has also received inquires from those who don’t fully understand the decision to embrace Spanish.
"They're, 'why are you using so much Spanish?' and it's, well, listen, come to Austin. This is a town that is imbued with a Latino culture and we didn't want to be a club that didn't reflect that Latino culture," Ruth said. "We are being way more progressive as we look at this stuff, it's a little bit unorthodox, listen, that's the story of Austin altogether. This is a city that does things differently in this state."
With green serving as the team's primary color, the organization has chosen to brand itself instead as "Verde." The team even has team branded vans called "Verde Vans" used to deliver merchandise to fans. New fans can also buy merchandise through the organization's proprietary distribution site, VerdeVan.com.
"We're trying to build more meaning in the term 'Verde,'" Ruth said. "Our hope over time is that that becomes kind of the ethos."
The team's new 'Verde' identity has become a favorite among fans and Austin locals so far, particularly among the team's supporters group, which helped bring the club to Austin through a fundraising campaign. One week after 'Verde' was introduced as the team's potential main theme, the supporters group released a song to coincide with the team's inaugural season.
"When we started talking about Verde as a thing we wanted to lean into, one week later [the supporters group] made a song and one of the lyrics was 'verde es un sentimiento,'" Ruth said. The line translates to 'green is a feeling.'
"It really spoke to the goal of what we're trying to achieve here, which is build a meaning in the word. And obviously it's Spanish which speaks to a huge portion of the Austin audience, but it's a word we want to build equity over time."
The organization entered into a multi-year with Austin-based clothing label YETI to be the team's official merchandise partner. So far the partnership has yielded the production of several items that place a heavy emphasis on Spanish as the brand's prominent language.
These include tee shirts with the phrases "somos Verdes," meaning "we are green," and "Austin FC listos," meaning "Austin FC is ready."
English is still featured on the merchandise as well in some instances. The brand has one style of t-shirt with the phrase "grow the legend" and a number of shirts branded with St. David's Health Care - one of the team's sponsors.
However, with Spanish taking the front seat for most of the team's merchandise, Austin FC is just the second team in any of the major American professional sports leagues to brand itself with Spanish as a primary language, next to the San Diego Padres of Major League Baseball.
However, the Padres' Spanish branding is only in relation to the team's name, and English is still the prominent language on its official team merchandise.
Teams in the NBA all have Spanish-branded merchandise for the league's annual Latin Night, when players don jerseys with "los" or el" preceding the team's names. But every other night of the year the teams revert to their standard English jerseys.
Meanwhile, Austin FC is making a push to target the culture and language of Austin and surrounding communities. The designs could someday prove to be a pioneer for other professional and even college teams to prioritize multicultural language in their branding.
"If Austin FC can ever be a point of inspiration, I think we we'd be honored by a thought or idea like that," Ruth said.
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