A little bit about the name, the shirt, and the fans.
My friend Casey likes to call the supporters of AC St. Louis a “seven nation army” – cue White Stripes. The reason is because there are seven distinct and active supporter groups. Laclede’s Army, Eads Brigade, The Henry Shaw Collective, Day Pints, River City Saints, United Knights and Chickenhead. Each has a distinct personality and brings a little something different to the party. There are also several passionate AC supporters that don’t align themselves with any particular group. Several of us had been talking about it for a while- that it would be nice to unify a little bit to be able to organize and discuss things with the front office a little better. It would also be nice to have a collective name that all fans could adopt without having to leave or join one of the existing groups. Names and ideas were bandied around but nothing really stuck.
Then came St. Louligans. As many of you know, I like to tinker around with designs and logos. I like to make “alternate” game flyers or funny signs. I also like to paint banners. I was trying to think of something to call the fans and a banner to hang up in the corner. In America we use Hooligan to refer to any passionate soccer fans. We must diferentiate between the Euro sense of Hooligan which carries the connotation of violence and troublemaking. To be clear, I mean it in the passionate fan crazy supporter way. Anyway, I stumbled into St. Louligan and thought it was a pretty cool name. Others liked it too and it just became a natural name for all of us to unite under.
Stage 2 was a design for a banner or T shirt. Originally it was just the name on a yellow flag with the AC Badge. The club wasn’t exactly cool with us using the badge, so I had to go back to the drawing board. I didn’t want to give up on St. Louligans because a lot of people seemed to like it. It wasn’t long before I started thinking about FC St. Pauli. I remember Kyle and Steve and Mitch and I had all talked about how cool the supporters of FC St. Pauli were. If you don’t know anything about St. Pauli, you should at least check out the Wikipedia page. They are famous for having crazy, passionate fans that show up to the games for the party and really make the games worth attending no matter what happens on the field. No matter if they are dwelling in the bottom levels of the Bundesliga or in the top flight like they are this year- the fans are always there. In the early part of the AC season, things were bleak on the field but the Supporter’s Corner was always rocking and we always had a good time. I liked the similarity and thought it would be cool to emmulate those fans. So a quick look at the St. Pauli fan emblem pretty quickly led to the current St. Louligan logo.
Soon after I pieced together the new logo with the Flame De Lis on the skull (kinda like the RCS logo, thanks Kyle. 😉 ), it wasn’t long before Objectivo contacted me about producing the shirts. And so here we are. I invite everyone to be a St. Louligan. All you have to do is support the team in whatever way you feel comfortable. Whether that involves singing and chanting, sitting quietly in the stands, watching the streams on the internet, painting banners, or spreading the word to people that don’t know how great live soccer can be- you are a Louligan.
If you want to announce your allegiance, feel free to go to objectivo and buy a shirt by clicking here. And speaking of shirts, a couple of the players and front office staff at AC STL liked them so much they’re gonna be wearing them around town. If you don’t want a shirt, you can still be part of the crowd. Wear Dark Green and Look Mean! Be loud my friends.
