When football and rock collide
No, not another defeat for Wenger’s men – this time their badge has been given the Pink Floyd treatment
An increasing tally of teams are missing a rock at the heart of the defence these days – so an Argentinian artist has helped out by giving them some rock at the heart of their club badges instead.
Juan Lopez Moses has been able to mix football crests with rock logos in a series of artworks that unite his two great passions.
“I’ve always been a massive fan of football and rock,” he tells FFT. “This idea came from something small. As a fan of Black Sabbath, for a while I’d been toying with finding some way to merge the badge of Aston Villa, who Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler both support, with the band’s flying devil mascot, Henry.
“I found a picture of Ozzy Osbourne online where he was wearing a Villa shirt, and imagined how it might look if I swapped the Villa lion with Henry. The end product was really good and so I decided to take the project on to another level.”
Indeed, Juan has designed a myriad different rock-inspired logos, boosting West Ham’s firepower by taking away the hammers and using the guns from Iron Maiden’s A Matter Of Life A Death album, as well as combining Chelsea with Gorillaz in honour of Blues fanatic Damon Albarn.
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Manchester United’s devil has been substituted for Stone Roses artwork and even Shrewsbury Town appear – as the film This Is Spinal Tap featured a band member wearing a Shrews top.
“I always try to use artists who have an interest in football already,” Juan explains. “British club crests were the best option when it came to getting inspiration. Most of them will contain certain elements: a rose, a bird, a lion, a devil, a crown, and so on. The idea was to replace these with something that characterised each band. Most of the best rock artists come from the British Isles.
“The majority of the badges use the band’s own logos while the other ones feature a distinctive element from the artist’s work. For Pink Floyd I chose the prism from the Dark Side Of The Moon cover, which I used to replace Arsenal’s famous cannon. For Daft Punk, I didn’t use a French team but their federation logo, because that had some metallic qualities that matched with the band’s helmets. That way, I could use a helmet to replace the rooster and it didn’t look out of place.”
Now the French national team will be hoping to live up to their new crest by winning the World Cup in Russia. Their fortunes surely rely on Kylian Mbappe: they’ll need the young pup all right to get lucky...