Palermo Show How to Modernise a Football Club Without Losing Its Identity
Football rebrands tend to follow a familiar pattern. Simplify the badge. Introduce a clean typeface. Remove anything that looks slightly awkward on a smartphone screen. Call it modern. Palermo have gone in almost the opposite direction. Instead of stripping their identity back, the Sicilian club have built a new visual system around everything that already made them distinctive: pink and black, the eagle, the city of Palermo and a cultural history defined by different influences colliding in the same place.
Start With What Already Exists
The project was developed by Palermo FC and City Football Group together with creative agency Alkemy, following a process that lasted more than a year.
Supporters, players, staff, former players, management and partners were all involved before the final identity was created. The idea was not to decide what Palermo should be from the outside, but to understand what the club already meant to the people connected to it. That produced four central ideas: Mosaic, Pink/Black, Born to Fly and Appartenenza.
Each comes directly from the club and city. Mosaic represents Palermo’s long history of cultural exchange. Pink/Black turns the club’s famous colours into a language of contrast. Born to Fly connects the eagle with ambition, while Appartenenza, belonging, represents the connection between Palermo supporters at home and around the world.
Too Much Is Never Too Much
Visually, that leads to something considerably louder than the average modern football identity. Palermo introduced the project with the phrase “Too Much Is Never Too Much”, and the new system lives up to it.
Rather than one neat corporate font, the club has three bespoke type families designed to intertwine like a mosaic. New textures, photographic styles and additional colours sit around the traditional pink and black, allowing different parts of the identity to take over depending on the situation.
The inspiration comes directly from Palermo itself: Arab-Norman history, Mediterranean culture and a city shaped by centuries of different people arriving, leaving and influencing what remained. Instead of trying to make all of that look clean, the design allows the contradictions to exist.
The Badge Did Not Need Fixing
Perhaps the smartest decision is what Palermo did not change. There is no new primary club crest. The existing eagle remains, while the new identity builds an entire visual world around it. The badge can appear when necessary, but typography, colour, layout and photography are now intended to make something recognisably Palermo even when the crest is not visible.
That is particularly interesting for a club owned within City Football Group. The obvious concern when a local football institution becomes part of an international ownership structure is that its identity becomes easier to export but less distinctive at home. Palermo’s approach makes the opposite argument: becoming more global does not require becoming more generic.
Pink Still Means Palermo
At the centre of everything remains the club’s most valuable visual asset.
Pink.
Palermo have worn it for more than a century, giving the club something most brands would spend enormous amounts of money trying to create: immediate recognition through colour alone.
The new identity does not attempt to replace that. It simply gives the pink and black more ways to exist. That approach can already be seen in the club’s 2026/27 visual output. Palermo’s newly released Neon Kit, for example, combines a contemporary colour treatment with the return of the club’s 1987 crest, under the idea Old Soul, New Energy. It is another example of history being reused rather than discarded.
Local First, Global Second
Palermo’s new identity will eventually appear everywhere: the Renzo Barbera, digital content, merchandise and official club communications. That means the real test will not be one launch video or one particularly nice Instagram graphic. It will be whether people eventually recognise Palermo before they even see the badge.
If that happens, the club will have achieved something many football rebrands struggle with. It will have become more modern without becoming less itself. Sometimes the best way to build a new identity is not to invent anything at all. It is simply to look more closely at what was already there.
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