Disruptive Until It’s Not  🔗 **Source:** [Disruptive Until It’s Not](https://automattic.design/2026/09/14/disruptive-until-its-not/) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: > - brand-identity > - design-strategy > - design-systems > - visual-identity > - differentiation > author: Automattic Design > source: https://automattic.design/2026/09/14/disruptive-until-its-not/ > reference: https://automattic.design/2026/09/14/disruptive-until-its-not/ > date created: 2026-09-15 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > ## 🏷️ Title > **Disruptive Until It's Not** — 14 September 2026, Automattic Design. No personal byline in the captured body; the writer self-identifies only as Spanish and as a designer, so authorship is recorded as **Automattic Design**. Article, ~2,000 words, heavily illustrated with football crests. > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > 1. Opening — crests as inherited, not chosen, identity > 2. The paradigm shift — Juventus 2017 (Interbrand), Inter 2021 (Bureau Borsche) > 3. Venezia FC and RC Deportivo — the grammar spreads quietly > 4. Athens Kallithea, and whether the swerve was real > 5. When the disruption becomes the brief — Borsche on his own influence > 6. Palermo (Alkemy+) and CE Europa (BOC Studio) — the current test case > 7. Open Questions — cost of entry, specificity as trend, what comes next > 8. Closing — load-bearing history vs. habit dressed up as history > ## 🔗 References (in-page) > Links in the captured body (the original routes several through `href.li`): > - Juventus announcement — https://www.juventus.com/en/news/articles/black-and-white-and-more-juventus-future-now > - Dezeen (2017), Juventus fan uprising — https://www.dezeen.com/2017/01/17/juventus-football-club-faces-fan-uprising-after-minimalist-new-logo-graphics-design/ > - Glue Glue, Juventus rebranding — https://www.glueglue.com/en/blog/juventus-rebranding > - Pangram Pangram on Bureau Borsche — https://pangrampangram.com/fr/blogs/journal/bureau-borsche > - Bureau Borsche, FC Internazionale Milano — https://bureauborsche.com/projects/fc-internazionale-milano/visual-identity > - nss sports, Borsche interview — https://www.nss-sports.com/en/lifestyle/25816/mirko-borsche-interview > - SoccerBible (Oct 2024), Borsche interview — https://www.soccerbible.com/interviews/2024/10/mirko-borsche-on-bureau-borsches-introduction-to-impact-on-modern-football-culture/ > - Creative Boom, Venice Biennale pavilion — https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/bureau-mirko-borsche-creates-the-branding-for-venices-art-biennale-pavillion/ > - TypeRoom, Venezia FC identity — https://www.typeroom.eu/bureau-borsche-venezia-fc-bold-visual-identity > - Bureau Borsche, RC Deportivo — https://bureauborsche.com/projects/rc-deportivo/visual-identity > - Bureau Borsche, Athens Kallithea FC — https://bureauborsche.com/projects/athens-kallithea-fc/visual-identity > - Wikipedia, Athens Kallithea F.C. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Kallithea_F.C. > - Creative Bloq, 2026 logo trends — https://www.creativebloq.com/design/logos-icons/these-logo-design-trends-will-define-2026 > - SoccerBible (Jul 2026), best rebrands — https://www.soccerbible.com/features/2026/07/the-best-football-rebrands-begin-with-what-s-already-there/ > - The Brand Identity, Alkemy+ / Palermo FC — https://the-brandidentity.com/project/over-a-year-of-listening-shaped-alkemy-s-identity-for-palermo-fc > - The Brand Identity, BOC Studio / CE Europa — https://the-brandidentity.com/project/why-boc-studio-rehabilitated-ce-europa-instead-of-redesigning-it > The body ends with an "Additional Reading" heading the capture left empty. > ## 📝 Summary > **What happened.** Football club identity moved, in under a decade, from maintenance work to an industry house style. Interbrand's 2017 Juventus rebrand deleted the zebra and shield for a flat "J" and provoked fan revolt; Bureau Borsche's 2021 Inter Milan identity compressed rather than subtracted heritage, keeping Giorgio Muggiani's 1908 concentric-circle structure while resolving it into an I/M monogram legible at nine millimetres. Juventus proved a crest could be a brand system; Borsche proved the system could survive contact with fans. The grammar spread through Venezia FC (2022), RC Deportivo and Athens Kallithea, promoted after rebuilding its identity as a cultural project. By 2025–26 Creative Bloq called the result a "sea of sans-serif sameness." Two September 2026 projects — Alkemy+ for Palermo, BOC Studio for CE Europa — are the test case: both excellent, both following an identical four-step structure. > **Why it matters.** Not really about football. It is an argument about how a good methodology becomes a default, and how the rhetoric of specificity ("a year of listening," "we distilled what was already there") turns into boilerplate once every competitor says it. > **Stakeholders.** Identity studios (Bureau Borsche, Alkemy+, BOC Studio, JKR, SOCIETAS); clubs able to fund custom type and season-long brand programs; fans who inherit rather than choose these symbols; any design discipline with its own exhausted-disruption cycle. > **Risks.** Causal claims are hedged but suggestive. Sourcing is thin in places: a Wikipedia page carries both a quote and the competitive record, the ~90 percent figure is "reportedly," the Deportivo work is undated in independent coverage. Read as argument, not evidence base. > **Bottom line.** Disruption has a costume. The discipline wanted is diagnostic, not stylistic: knowing which parts of an inherited identity are load-bearing history and which are habit dressed up as history. > ## 📖 Main Content > The essay opens autobiographically: the author grew up Spanish, surrounded by football's meaning as tradition, loyalty and community, without ever feeling that belonging. Design is what did land. Crests are inherited — a badge passed from grandfather to grandson, a colour a city builds identity around, a symbol meaning something different across a river — which makes football a laboratory for watching design intervene in culture. > The historical claim is precise. For most of football's modern history a rebrand meant maintenance: cleaning crests for digital use, flattening a gradient, fixing a badge that had drifted across decades of shirts and merchandise. Nobody expected a crest to explain where a club was going. > Interbrand's 2017 Juventus work broke that, framed as a bet that a club could behave like a lifestyle brand first and a sports institution second. Fans hated it, and the Dezeen complaint — that the logo made them customers rather than fans — is treated as prophetic. A contemporary commentator predicted many clubs would follow; the author's verdict is right about direction, wrong about mechanism. What spread was not flat corporate minimalism but the digestible version Borsche worked out four years later. > Inter is the pivot. Where Interbrand subtracted heritage, Borsche's studio compressed it: the 1908 structure stays, redrawn for a phone screen. The launch still drew intense Italian television criticism and personal threats lasting about two weeks. Borsche says football was never planned work — it arrived via fashion and sportswear relationships (Nike, Balenciaga, Supreme), with Inter and Venezia coinciding accidentally. Venice was not new ground: the studio had reimagined the Lion of Saint Mark for the 2019 Biennale pavilion and built Venezia FC's site in 2021 before the 2022 identity — neo-grotesque wordmark, V-crest, orange and gold returning after two decades of white — under the brief "let's do almost nothing." RC Deportivo got the same treatment with almost no independent coverage, so the grammar spread before the industry could name it. > Athens Kallithea is where the vocabulary got interesting rather than merely approved. Venezia's brand lead, Philipakos, took over the modest Greek club in August 2021; the identity landed in September 2022 as what Borsche called a perfect spiritual sequel to Venezia. The author adds a personal aside about buying the shirt purely for the design, then handles impact carefully, conceding correlation is not proof before listing two second-place finishes and the 2023–24 title that returned the club to the top flight afte  I’m Spanish, so football was always present in my life, but I never became a fan. I understood its significance to those around me, as it was more than just a game; it represented tradition, loyalty, and community. However, I never felt that same sense of belonging that others did. What did land was the profession I ended up in: design. Those two things—a sport I never fully loved and a discipline I do—started overlapping in a way I couldn’t leave alone. Football crests are inherited: a badge passed from grandfather to grandson, a color a city builds its identity around, a symbol that can mean something entirely different across a river. This is a revealing place to watch design intervene. **When an industry redesigns what people inherit rather than choose, you see what design can do to culture, and what it flattens when everyone reaches for the same toolkit.** Lately, I keep seeing the same moves: a monogram in a circle, a quieter version of the club’s colors, a typeface meant to feel authentic, campaign photos that look more like fashion… **Here’s the question I want to sit with: once an entire industry starts making the same “disruptive” move, has anyone actually disrupted anything—or just performed it well enough to go first?** **My question isn’t a criticism of any single project.** A lot of the work behind this pattern is genuinely excellent: with some of the best identity design happening right now is happening in football and sport overall. What I’m interested in is the pattern itself, and how quickly it became one. **What felt disruptive a few years ago has already become the sector’s default language.** And when everyone uses the same gestures to prove they’re different, those gestures stop proving anything at all. **This is something we’ve seen across industries, and ours is no exception.** #### **The paradigm shift** **For most of football’s modern history, a “rebrand” meant maintenance, not disruption.** Clubs cleaned up their crests for digital use, flattened a gradient, removed a drop shadow, or fixed a badge that had slowly lost its shape across decades of shirts, stickers, and merchandise. But the core stayed the same. It was identity work, but mostly in service of preservation. Nobody expected a crest to explain where a club was going. It just had to still feel like itself. Two moves broke that pattern, four years apart, and neither on its own would have been enough to change the paradigm. *  *  *  The first was [**Interbrand’s 2017 Juventus rebrand**](https://href.li/?https://www.juventus.com/en/news/articles/black-and-white-and-more-juventus-future-now)—the one that deleted the club’s zebra and shield entirely in favor of a flat “J” and the word JUVENTUS in a bold custom face. It was framed, correctly, as a bet that a football club could behave like a lifestyle brand first and a sports institution second. **Fans hated it.** *“The new logo tells me this is the Juventus brand and we are customers, not fans,”* [one wrote](https://href.li/?https://www.dezeen.com/2017/01/17/juventus-football-club-faces-fan-uprising-after-minimalist-new-logo-graphics-design/) — a line that has aged into a kind of prophecy. [A contemporary commentary on the redesign](https://href.li/?https://www.glueglue.com/en/blog/juventus-rebranding) predicted, almost offhandedly, that “many other clubs are going to follow soon.” **It was right about the direction and wrong about the mechanism**: what actually spread wasn’t Juventus’s flat corporate minimalism, it was the more digestible version of the same instinct that Bureau Borsche worked out four years later. **Juventus proved a crest could be treated as a brand system rather than a badge. Bureau Borsche proved that the system could survive contact with fans — the second move, and the one the rest of the industry actually learned from**. Where Interbrand had subtracted heritage, [Mirko Borsche’s studio](https://href.li/?https://pangrampangram.com/fr/blogs/journal/bureau-borsche) compressed it. That’s the whole difference, and it’s why [**Bureau Borsche’s 2021 identity for FC Internazionale Milano**](https://href.li/?https://bureauborsche.com/projects/fc-internazionale-milano/visual-identity) is the version of this idea that actually stuck. The new crest keeps Giorgio Muggiani’s 1908 concentric-circle structure but resolves it into an I/M monogram, [reportedly preserving something like 90 percent of the original’s spatial relationships](https://href.li/?https://www.nss-sports.com/en/lifestyle/25816/mirko-borsche-interview). **Nothing sacred was removed; it was just redrawn to be legible at nine millimeters on a phone screen.**     It landed harder than the “slick” headlines suggested. Borsche has since described Inter’s launch as triggering intense criticism on Italian television and personal threats that lasted around two weeks—quieted less by any design consensus than by Inter winning the league that same season. None of this was planned. [Borsche has said](https://href.li/?https://www.soccerbible.com/interviews/2024/10/mirko-borsche-on-bureau-borsches-introduction-to-impact-on-modern-football-culture/) he never expected football to become part of the studio’s work; it came through existing fashion and sportswear relationships. Nike remembered their LeBron James work, while Balenciaga and Supreme had already shaped the studio’s reputation. Inter and Venezia, he said, happened “coincidentally… at the same time, but quite separately.” Venice, though, wasn’t new territory. The studio had already reimagined the [Lion of Saint Mark for the city’s Biennale pavilion in 2019](https://href.li/?https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/bureau-mirko-borsche-creates-the-branding-for-venices-art-biennale-pavillion/), then built [Venezia FC’s](https://href.li/?https://www.typeroom.eu/bureau-borsche-venezia-fc-bold-visual-identity) website and webshop in 2021. The full club identity arrived in 2022: a neo-grotesque wordmark, a V-crest using that modernized lion, and the return of orange and gold after two decades of white. Borsche’s line about the brief says everything about the studio’s instinct: “let’s do almost nothing.” Philipakos, Venezia’s brand lead at the time, is the link to what comes next. *  Somewhere in the same run of work sits [**Bureau Borsche’s identity for RC Deportivo**](https://href.li/?https://bureauborsche.com/projects/rc-deportivo/visual-identity),with an historic Spanish crest given the same monogram-and-restraint treatment, undated in any independent design coverage I could find. That silence is itself worth noting: the same studio was already applying its own new grammar to a second and third historic badge before the industry had caught up enough to notice, let alone name what it was looking at. *  #### **Athens Kallithea, and whether the swerve was real** **If Inter is where the new vocabulary got mainstream approval,** [**Athens Kallithea FC**](https://href.li/?https://bureauborsche.com/projects/athens-kallithea-fc/visual-identity) **is where it got interesting.** In August 2021 — while still leading the brand for Venezia, ahead of that club’s own 2022 relaunch — Philipakos took over a modest Greek club that had spent nearly two decades outside the top flight. Kallithea’s own identity landed in September 2022, the same year as Venezia’s, with a Bureau Borsche system Borsche himself has called “a perfect spiritual sequel” to Venezia: with the same restraint, pushed into an entirely different typographic register. *Fun fact: as much as I don’t like football, I ended up buying the Athens Kallithea FC t-shirt because I really loved the design.* *  [Versus called it](https://href.li/?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Kallithea_F.C.) “one of the cleanest football rebrands ever.” Was any of this a *real* impact, or just a good story? Here the record is genuinely on Kallithea’s side, with the honest caveat that correlation isn’t proof: [**since the rebrand, the club has finished second in Super League 2**](https://href.li/?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Kallithea_F.C.) in back-to-back seasons, then won the division outright in 2023–24, returning to Greece’s top flight for the first time in eighteen years. **Design didn’t score the goals. But a club that rebuilt its entire public identity around being taken seriously as a cultural project, and was then taken seriously enough to be promoted while building a genuine cultural following, is a stronger case study than most rebrands ever get to make.** #### **When the disruption becomes the brief** Borsche has basically admitted this himself. [In a 2024 interview](https://href.li/?https://www.soccerbible.com/interviews/2024/10/mirko-borsche-on-bureau-borsches-introduction-to-impact-on-modern-football-culture/), when asked whether Bureau Borsche had changed football culture, he first said, “Not really!” Then, after a pause: “It’s starting to work on me.” He could see the shift: football moving toward “much cleaner aesthetics,” with “brands across Europe” adopting the same “clean, fashion-forward” language his studio brought to Inter and Venezia. His client list has since grown to include Bayern Munich, BSC Young Boys, and TSV 1860 Munich. **But he doesn’t sound especially proud of it. What he says he wants now is “more variety between the clubs” — the disruptor watching his own disruption harden into the new house style, and not entirely liking what he sees.** 😂 That 2017 prediction about Juventus, that “many other clubs are going to follow soon,” was right, just not in the way its author expected. Football didn’t copy Juventus’s corporate minimalism. It copied Bureau Borsche’s *softer* version: keep the heritage shape, simplify the mark, tighten the palette, add custom type, shoot it like fashion, and insist it was never really a redesign. By 2025–26, the trade press had a name for it. [Creative Bloq called it](https://href.li/?https://www.creativebloq.com/design/logos-icons/these-logo-design-trends-will-define-2026) a “sea of sans-serif sameness.” Even the exceptions proved the point: [Sporting CP returned](https://href.li/?https://www.soccerbible.com/features/2026/07/the-best-football-rebrands-begin-with-what-s-already-there/) to its 1945 crest with a custom “Sporting Sans,” Werder Bremen built around a serif drawn from its 1924 “W,” and Newcastle’s leaked crests drew Juventus-level backlash for the same reason: heritage handled carelessly. **The line that made Bureau Borsche feel disruptive in 2021** — we didn’t impose a vision, we distilled what was already there—**is now the most common sentence in football-identity press releases.** That’s not dishonest on its own. But when every ambitious club follows the same playbook—protect the crest, commission a heritage serif, shoot the campaign like a fashion editorial—sincerity and performance get hard to tell apart. The move worked because it wasn’t what everyone else was doing. Now it is. #### **Palermo and CE Europa: the current test case** Two projects surfaced in design coverage the first week of september 2026 put this tension under real pressure, and I think both are worth taking seriously precisely because they’re good enough to make the critique harder, not easier. *  [**Alkemy+’s identity for Palermo FC**](https://href.li/?https://the-brandidentity.com/project/over-a-year-of-listening-shaped-alkemy-s-identity-for-palermo-fc) is the more maximal of the two. The brief, per the club’s CMO, was “not to redesign Palermo FC, but to give shape, language and consistency to what Palermo FC already is”: a year of listening distilled into four pillars (Mosaic, Pink and Black, Rise and Fly, Global Family). *  [**BOC Studio’s work for CE Europa**](https://href.li/?https://the-brandidentity.com/project/why-boc-studio-rehabilitated-ce-europa-instead-of-redesigning-it) is smaller, sharper, and more disciplined. Their framing was architectural: treat the century-old crest “like a protected façade,” changing the minimum needed. Both projects are honest, well-made, and specific to their clubs. They’re also following the same structure we’ve now seen from Bureau Borsche, JKR, and SOCIETAS: protect the historic mark, build a heritage-led typeface, tighten the palette around a clear rule, and add an art direction or motion layer to make the system feel alive. **That doesn’t make them plagiaristic. It just shows what happens when a good methodology gets validated so often that it becomes the default.** The harder question is whether “protect, distill, custom-type, activate” is now best practice, or simply the next uniform: a rehabilitation aesthetic worn as fluently, and interchangeably, as the monogram trend it replaced. #### Open Questions I don’t think there’s a clean verdict here, and I’d rather leave it open. If “a year of listening” and a bespoke heritage typeface are now the standard moves in any serious football rebrand, are they still proof of real specificity? Or has specificity itself become the trend? And who gets to play this game? Not every club can afford a custom type family, a full art direction system, and a season-by-season brand program. So does the new idea of “good football branding” quietly push smaller, stranger identities out of view? And if the next disruption won’t come from typography or heritage research, because that toolkit now belongs to everyone, where does it come from? Fan-owned identity processes? Dynamic, generative systems? Or another Juventus-style rupture that looks wrong at first, until time proves otherwise? **None of this is unique to football. Every part of design has its own version of “that used to be disruptive, now it’s just the brief.” Football just makes the pattern easier to see, because its symbols are so tied to inherited belonging.** > The real discipline comes before choosing whether to protect or break something. It’s in understanding what you’re looking at: what is load-bearing history, and what is just habit dressed up as history. > > **Most of these projects got that right on their own. The harder question is what happens when everyone gets it right the same way.** **Which is, I think, the honest answer to the question I opened with: not who moved first, but whether the rest of us can still tell the difference between disruption and its costume.** Additional Reading, Disruptive Until It’s Not, Automattic Design, 01m2jp85sgk9xayxrjyfrryhkj.