‘We’re cleaning it up’: Inside Aston Villa’s top to bottom club rebrand  

It’s almost a year to the day since Chris Heck took on the role as Aston Villa’s president of business operations. In the week he joined the Premier League club a rebrand of its club crest was announced, marking a drastic change to Aston Villa’s brand identity for the first time since 1992.

It was a change he was not aware of, claims Heck, who had initially planned to spend the first six months in his new job “diving in, observing and laying out a three-year plan.” His plans changed quickly.

Heck moved to the club from his role as president of US basketball team Philadelphia 76ers, which he initially joined as chief sales and marketing officer in 2013. He hadn’t intended on changing the club’s crest before he joined, given the previous shield had been in place for 31 years and the “continuity” it brought to the Villa brand was important to him.

“Then all of a sudden, I show up on day one and it changed – you can imagine that was quite a shock,” Heck recalls.

Now, the club is returning to an updated version of its previous crest as part of a wider full rebrand from top to bottom.

“We’re cleaning it up,” Heck explains. This time, Aston Villa has consulted its fanbase in depth, after complaints the options they received last time around didn’t offer much choice. 

The club was run on efficiency as opposed to ambition.

Chris Heck, Aston Villa

Football club rebrands are notoriously tricky to pull off. In Aston Villa’s case, Heck says fans complained they had not been adequately consulted on the move to a circular logo.

Other clubs have faced big backlashes from fans and the media alike. Leeds United overhauled its crest in 2018 before promptly switching back to the original after 77,000 people signed a petition calling on the club to rethink the design.  

The Aston Villa rebrand goes much deeper, claims Heck: “It wasn’t just about the crest, it was about the business practices and the expectations, and the attitude and the belief of what we could be.”  

He argues simplicity wins when it comes to crests and logos, meaning the mission was not to overcomplicate things. 

Financially, the club has suffered recently, with a loss of £119.6m after tax in the financial year ending 31 May 2023, compared with a profit of £300,000 the previous year. The hope is that with the club rebrand, global ambitions and Champions League football next season, alongside operational changes and an enhanced in-house marketing team, Aston Villa will turn its fortunes around.  

Going global

Aston Villa’s return to the Champions League next season for the first time in 42 years is a huge achievement for the club, which was only promoted back into the Premier League in the 2018/19 season. 

The rebrand is not a coincidence. As Heck explains, his team turned what should have been a three-year project around in just a year to coincide with the club’s success on the pitch.  

“We’re globalising this club,” says Heck, who set his team to work digging into social media data to find out which countries beyond the UK had a fan presence. The club estimates it has 300 million fans around the world, a number it wants to grow as it looks to emulate rivals like Manchester United and Real Madrid that have become global brands.   

The strategy around driving global growth originally centered on content, says Heck.

“How do we double in size and how do we personalise, whatever country someone comes from?” he asks. 

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In order to become a global brand via the club rebrand, Aston Villa is pulling on its pre-existing talent levers. Men’s team goalkeeper Emi Martinez, for example, is a World Cup winner, while Heck heaps praise on Alisha Lehmann, women’s team forward who has the most followers on Instagram of any female footballer at more than 17 million.  

But global brands need big players behind the scenes too. “We’ve pretty much doubled in size over the last 12 months,” says Heck, from graphic design and marketing teams to sales and operations.  

As part of its turnaround plans, Aston Villa is moving operations in-house, with the entire rebrand completed internally.

“My goal was, let’s control our own destiny and bring everything in-house,” he explains. “I want to bring in everything possible to control our customer experience, our brand experience and, quite frankly, our revenue opportunity.” 

Merchandising will be internal too, so the club can have “control of everything.”  

Breaking the mould

In short, Aston Villa has achieved a full brand and business audit, and rebranded within a season.

One of the club’s distinctive brand assets is its claret and blue colourway, which was later mimicked by West Ham and Burnley, something Heck tries to see the funny side of. It was important with the rebrand that Aston Villa could make sure it is “distinctive as being the first” to use these colours. 

The club’s kit partner since the 2022/23 season had been Castore, but Heck cut the deal short a year early.

“Our kit was falling apart on us and I came to the conclusion this was not going to work,” he says with brutal honesty.  

The kit for the 2023/24 season was a struggle for players, tearing easily and becoming darker as games and training went on as it was not absorbing sweat properly. Reports at the beginning of the season suggest the club’s female players were also uncomfortable with the look. Heck calls this a “disaster”.  

This is the club that’s going to break the mould.

Chris Heck, Aston Villa

Getting out of the deal with Castore was a “headache of epic proportions” and the club will now have its kits manufactured by sporting giant Adidas.

“We were determined to get this right, to do the right thing for our players and our fans,” he says. 

When Heck began evaluating Aston Villa’s kit partnership, the audit spiralled and the club began questioning all its other deals.

“I wanted a clean slate, so we kicked everyone to the curb that was not a good deal financially,” Heck explains, as well as those partners that weren’t adjusting to the club’s change of “mindset”.  

Often, new leadership teams want to change things up immediately. New CMOs want to rebrand to put their stamp on things, but Heck argues Aston Villa’s rebrand makes sense.  

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“The club was run on efficiency as opposed to ambition,” he says, and being tight-fisted wasn’t helping the brand grow.

“I didn’t come over here to be average,” Heck adds, describing the huge potential he sees for the club in its 150th anniversary year.

“This is the club that’s going to break the mould,” he says. The top level of the Premier League is in flux. The traditional ‘big six’ is changing and Aston Villa ended the current season ahead of the likes of Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United. It was this potential that appealed to Heck. 

“Aston Villa was the one that stood out. It’s in a huge market, it’s a club of history and then they hired this magical coach,” he adds. “This is the club that’s going to break the mould and that’s when I was like – OK, I’m in.”