Two years after introducing a new crest that turned out to be unpopular, Major League Soccer CF Montréal is trying to reconnect with its roots.
The club unveiled a new crest on Friday morning, which will officially go into use at the start of the 2023 season. It features several elements that call back to the club’s visual identity prior to 2021, when they were known as the Montréal Impact. These elements include an emphasis on the colour blue, a bevelled fleur-de-lys inside a shield — which sits on top of a roundel with the club’s name and year of founding — and blue and black stripes in the shield and bottom part of the roundel.
The club’s name will remain “CF Montréal.”
“Today we are turning another important page of our history,” said Joey Saputo, chair of CF Montréal’s board of directors, on the team’s website. “A few months ago, we began to reflect on our identity, as well as our logo, and concluded that a realignment was necessary. The employees, fans, and partners we met clearly expressed their desire to reinstate certain elements that have marked the Club’s history and are at the heart of our identity. We heard them loud and clear, and we are proposing a logo that meets those requests.”
“I am pleased that the ‘Impact blue,’ as we have named it, will dominate our new emblem,” said club president and CEO Gabriel Gervais. “I would like to thank our employees, fans and partners for their contribution, as well as MLS, and the equipment manufacturer Adidas for their collaboration. Developing a new logo is a complex exercise. The process, which began before my arrival, also had its share of challenges in an ecosystem like MLS, both in the choice of shapes and colours.”
The new logo replaces a crest unveiled in January 2021 during a complete overhaul of the club’s identity. That also included a name change from “Montréal Impact” to “Club de Foot Montréal,” or CF Montréal for short. The crest unveiled then featured silver Ms and arrows forming the shape of a snowflake inside a roundel with a blue border.
It was widely seen as a downgrade, though, in the weeks and months that followed. “To be honest, the months following the unveiling of the [2021] identity were not easy,” Saputo admitted during a press conference Friday.
“Although we never really strayed away from our primary mission, we did however miss the opportunity to communicate it properly,” Saputo added.
CF Montréal then announced on Twitter in early May that “we have listened to our supporters and partners” and would unveil a new logo that “will highlight several key elements of our identity and history.”
The blue and black stripes in the crest may hint at a return to a similar motif for the club’s home jerseys in 2023. The Impact wore blue and black vertical stripes at home prior to the 2021 overhaul. Jerseys for the 2023 season should be unveiled next March and, having unveiled a new away kit for 2022, CF Montréal is due for a new home kit.
Merchandise featuring the new crest will be available for fans to purchase online by Christmas 2022.
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