War On Logos #4: The Bucs Were Raided
Taking a slightly different approach for this edition of ‘War on Logos’, I’m taking a look at a team that doesn’t play in North America. Being a hockey fan living in the UK (and being more of an NHL fan), one of my pet peeves about the majority of UK based teams are logos that are either quite blatantly stolen – sorry, “adopted” from North American teams, or logos that just look bad in general, or in this case, both. I present to you the Romford Raiders.
The first thing you’ll notice, unless you’re not very familiar with sports logos, is that they have put in a recoloured version of the logo that the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers used between 1976 and 1996, known as ‘Buccaneer Bruce’ by fans (although the Raiders first took the ice in 1987, how they got hold of the Bucs’ logo is beyond me). They have placed a pair of crossed hockey sticks behind him, and added the team name, in the most generic font ever (Times New Roman, anyone?), and called it their logo.
The worst thing about this logo is that it looks like the ‘designer’ hastily cobbled it all together in five minutes on Microsoft PowerPoint or something… although as you can see here, the logo appears as if it’s also been slightly ‘Photoshopped’, having a tacky bevel effect added just for the sake of having it. The bevel doesn’t exist on the jersey logo, but it’s always present on other things like game programmes, leaflets and the team website.
Curiously, sometimes the font used on the logo is more of a blocky font, traditionally used by US based teams such as the Boston Bruins. All this does for Romford’s logo is make it look slightly better, though that’s really not saying much.
I’m having difficulty finding much else to say about this team’s logo, though one thing that does annoy me is the team’s choice of name, the Raiders. Not because they weren’t named after anything (the team apparently named themselves after a military aircraft type, as the London Borough of Havering, in which the town is located, has something to do with the history of aircraft or whatever), but because of that uber-generic sound the team name has, with both the team name and city name beginning with the same letter generic alliteration, something that a lot of other UK based teams are guilty of (some US based teams do that too, but for good reasons). ‘Raiders’ does nothing at all to represent the local area, unless you count the local scumbags that steal from, or rather, ‘Raid’ shops.
If they insisted on going for the military aircraft theme, a better name for them would have been the Spitfires… that is, if it wasn’t being used by their recently formed lower league team, who ironically also have a slightly better logo.
I’m Wildwing64, and I declare War On Logos.