Wolverhampton Joins the Official Offside $%#! List

By: Laurie | March 28th, 2009

Remember back a month or two ago, when the Premier League’s people came after The Offside for using club crests, and we had to remove them from our site? And then right after that, Hull City became the newest favo[u]rite club of all of us by giving us permission to use their logo? That was sweet.

But if Hull is now tops on our “Nice” list, Wolverhampton Wanderers just asked for a lump of coal and a ticket straight to the top of our ~~$%#!~~ Naughty list for telling our Wolves blogger, Toby, he can’t use the Wolverhampton crest. And not only that, shortly after they responded to his request, his YouTube account was canceled for posting videos.

Quite the coincidence, yes?

Toby is an extremely dedicated team blogger. He keeps fans up-to-date by frequently posting team news, and his blog is consistently among the top twenty on the site for pageviews. And he does this for no money whatsoever, just because he loves the team.

With Wolves looking like they have a shot of making the Prem next year for the first time in ages, one would think management would be looking for all the press they could find to build interest in the club as they make the jump. I think the majority of 21st century thinkers would see that fans like Toby are the perfect way to reach a new audience and show the world outside Wolves that there is a football team here.

Apparently not.

Daryl said it best in the original post:

While football fans see football crests as a helpful way of identifying football teams, Football Data Co (the Premier League’s licensing arm) sees football crests as a way to make money.

We could understand the legal takedown notice if we were profiteering from club crests by selling counterfeit Arsenal shirts or dodgy Man Utd dog food bowls. But we’re not. We use club crests the way they were originally intended: to identify teams.

And for the Premier League to prevent us doing that is not only comically tyrannical, it’s extremely short-sighted too.

English football in general seems to believe they don’t need the publicity that comes from the internet. Perhaps they feel they can get all the publicity they need in the 21st century from that healthy, thriving and profitable media, the newspaper.

Good luck with that, boys.

If you’d like to drop Wolves a note letting them know what you think of their choice, feel free. info@wolves.co.uk . (Remember that it will probably carry more credibility if you keep it relatively thoughtful, civil and obscenity-free.)

P.S. Contrast the old-time approach of the English leagues to MLS in the US, which is definitely a 21st century league. I know I risk jinxing us by bringing attention to it, but up to this point MLS has been amazing. As far as I know, the only communication we’ve ever gotten about logos involved the Galaxy sending us an updated one for us to use after they rebranded.

MLS even has its own YouTube channel that allows bloggers to embed videos. (How…progressive.) And they’ve recently upgraded to allow us to cut up their highlight videos to create our own, shorter videos — for example, if we want to show only one goal from the game.

MLS may still be working toward quality play on the field, but they are miles ahead of other leagues when it comes to reaching out to fans via technology.