FC Spartak Moscow is a Russian football club based in Moscow, founded on 18 April 1922. Its visual identity is built around a red-and-white diamond (rhombus) enclosing a white Cyrillic letter “C” (for “Спартак”) and a football, an emblem whose core elements have remained consistent for decades. In 2022, the club presented an updated version of the logo to mark its centenary, with the new mark debuting on match kits in the 2023/24 season.
Design and History
The Spartak emblem was originally created by club co-founder Nikolai Starostin in the 1930s. According to the design studio Quberten, which handled the 2022 rebrand, “the direction of the line inside has changed, and once even the color, but the rhombus always remained as a rhombus.” [1] The first official logo was approved in 1935, when the All-Union sports society “Spartak” was formally established. Starostin sketched a red diamond with the letter “C” and a diagonal stripe, reportedly oriented horizontally in contrast to rival club Dynamo’s vertical diamond, though Starostin himself never confirmed this story. [2]
In 1949, the diagonal stripe inside the diamond changed direction, a modification whose reasons remain unclear. [2] A more significant change came in 1998, when a conflict with the International Physical Culture and Sports Society “Spartak” over rights to the original diamond forced the club to alter its emblem. A black-and-white football was added inside the letter “C,” a version fans derisively nicknamed the “pregnant” rhombus. [2]
In 2013, Spartak introduced a new emblem and its first-ever brandbook, developed with the creative agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The new mark was based on the legendary letter “C” inscribed in the rhombus in 1935, with the football inside the monogram now rendered in red instead of black. Four gold stars were added above the diamond to honor the club’s 21 Soviet and Russian championships. [3] [4]
For the club’s centenary in 2022, the design studio Quberten carried out a large-scale rebrand. The studio refined the emblem with a “delicate simplification,” adjusting the angle of the rhombus sides and the placement of the stars. The rhombus was built with a modular angle of 30 degrees, with the bevels of the letter “C” subordinated to the rhombus angles. At the club’s request, the ball was graphically “dissolved” into the stripe, appearing less accentuated than in the 1998 and 2013 versions. [1] [5] The new emblem became the 24th in the club’s history. [5]
In April 2022, the club also presented a special retro logo for its centenary, designed by Quberten. This version referenced the historical rhombus of the late 1930s and early 1940s, with a leather ball modeled on the Tiento used at the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay. [6]
Meaning and Symbolism
The rhombus and the red-and-white colors are described by the club as “the defining visual feature” of Spartak, with the letter “C” called “the most characteristic part of the logo.” [7] The 2022 rebrand was accompanied by a new club slogan: “Spartak: here everyone matters.” [8]
Typography and Design
As part of the 2022 rebrand, Quberten developed an exclusive headline font for the club called FCSM Antiqua, with type designer Ivan Gladkikh of the TypeType studio involved in assembling the typeface. The font was designed based on the letter “C” from the logo, described as “the quintessence of the club’s history.” It includes Latin and Cyrillic scripts, uppercase and lowercase letters, Roman numerals, special characters, and diacritics. A more neutral sans-serif companion font, FCSM Sans, was also created. [1] The club noted that no other Russian Premier League club has a similar custom font. [9]
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