Club Insignia of the Week: FC Roskilde

This week’s badge is simple, elegant, and needs to be on a t-shirt. The Danes might be better known for bacon, porn and their rollicking, Jesper Olsen-led superteam of the 1980s, but we should maybe add graphic design to that list.

AWESOME.

Isn’t it a thing of beauty?

Bold, sans-serif looking font for the team name, then a glorious, large rendering of a big bird, head-on. One presumes they’ve studied the iconography of birds before coming up with their demented, Satan-possessed choice, posed from the neck plumage up and missing its eyes. After all, what else screams “mid-table Danish soccer team” than a bird flown in from the depths of Hades?

In Andean times, bird imagery denoted symbolic power; Crested Eagles, for one, were oftentimes portrayed with “large, robust bodies, stout legs with talons, heavy beaks, beady eyes, distinctive yellow ceres, and feather colorations.“

Of course, for this alarming avian, we must fill in the blanks using our imagination, but what’s given does a steady enough job of making the point that the bird, much like FC Roskilde itself, is definitely not to be messed with.

The town of Roskilde itself dates all the way back to the Viking Age, so the idea of power and brute strength makes sense. It’s also the home of a sweet rock festival that’s been hosting more bizarre line-ups in its 38-year history than Rafa Benitez during his tim at Anfield. Seriously: any festival that dares attempt to align Eric Clapton, Metallica and Phil Collins on one headline is clearly drunk with that power derived from our eyeless bird friend at stage left.

The club itself is unremarkable, a 2004 amalgam of three local area clubs – Roskilde Boldklub 1906, Svogerslev Boldklub, and Himmelev-Veddelev Boldklub – that plays average soccer in a ground that holds 6,000. Their 2nd Division East league title in 2008/09 has put them among the big boys this year, though a 0-0-3 start to the year (scored 1, conceded 10) sees them sitting dead last, poised for a return trip to the suburban pallor from whence they came. So much for the intimidating power of that blind eagle, then.