The Five Borough Bond
— Putting New York City at the
heart of its football club
Ten years since its founding, New York City FC asked itself what it would take to reach the upper echelons of MLS clubs and New York City teams.
An ambitious plan that included a new soccer stadium in Queens and significant investment in player development was in the works. But to continue building a devoted base of hardcore fans while inspiring new ones to join would mean reframing what the club stood for beyond the game.
Any team that seeks to stake its claim to NYC needs to live up to the city’s colossal character. Our approach was to develop a visual and verbal identity that embodied the relentless hustle and eclectic spirit of the city.
Client: New York City FC
Agency: Gretel
Year: 2024
Team: Ryan Moore, Justin Au, Dylan Mulvaney,Andrea Trabucco-Campos, Etienne Murphy, Alaijah Hampton, John Choi, Hayato Yamane, Ian Beckman Reagan, Kasia Galla, Murad Assaf, Ian Chen
Type: Justin Au (Concept), Tobias Frere-Jones, Nina Stössinger, Christine Bateup
Agency: Gretel
Year: 2024
Team: Ryan Moore, Justin Au, Dylan Mulvaney,Andrea Trabucco-Campos, Etienne Murphy, Alaijah Hampton, John Choi, Hayato Yamane, Ian Beckman Reagan, Kasia Galla, Murad Assaf, Ian Chen
Type: Justin Au (Concept), Tobias Frere-Jones, Nina Stössinger, Christine Bateup
Eight million interlocking stories
To capture the the spirit of our club and city, we developed The Five Borough Bond— a creative platform that serves as our core ethos and guiding metaphor.
The Five Borough Bond embraces contrast and juxtaposition, a wild mix of ever-changing local flavors and iconic legacies. The relentless hustle and colossal scale of the city—edgy, tough and resilient— enriched by the pulsing rhythm and poetic beauty of everyday life, interwoven with unexpected moments made possible through eight million interlocking stories.
By forging bonds across all five boroughs and celebrating the stories of New Yorkers brought together by NYCFC, we are continuously building the future of our club, our city, and our game.
From local club to global icon
The club’s updated badge builds on its subway token-inspired predecessor crafted by Matthew Wolff in collaboration with founding fans. The overall structure was optimized for legibility at small scales, while individual elements were refined to work together harmoniously or used independently as a suite of marks.
A refined monogram sits at the center of the badge, designed with enhanced balance and confident proportions that evoke a strength and pride that matches the bold spirit of the city. Its construction mirrors the geometry and flared serifs in the identity’s subway signage inspired typefaces, featured in the outer ring lettering. The badge is punctuated by a pentagon on each side as a continued reference to the five boroughs of New York City. Developed in a close collaboration between Gretel, Frere-Jones Type, and the New York City FC team.
The characters of the City
The team’s custom typeface is a modern imagination of the iconic pre-modernist signage used across the Independent Subway System (IND), which has connected New York City’s five boroughs since its construction in 1932. Concepted in-house and drawn by Frere-Jones Type, ‘NYCFC’ appears in two styles.
‘Local’ is built on the rectilinear geometry and petit serif flares found in monospaced tile lettering, which is still prominent in stations citywide. ‘Express’ marries the same details with the bold and idiosyncratic proportions featured in the IND’s directional signage. Their interchanged use in combination with inset details and companion pictograms reflects the voice of a team that represents all of New York City – loud, irreverent and cacophonous.
Weaving together NYC’s urban fabric
The brand’s mosaic system is a visual representation of the Five Borough Bond — individual components of various shapes and colors, woven together into an interconnected tapestry. Modular by nature, mosaics build and scale into structural elements, camouflage patterns, and generative textures that portray the different neighborhoods across the boroughs. As a system, these brand elements weave together the countless stories that unite the club and the city, from the pavement to the pitch.
Next Stop: Queens
In tandem with the launch of the club’s new identity, New York City FC announced a landmark campaign to construct New York City’s first-ever soccer-specific stadium in Willets Point, Queens – slated for completion in 2027. The stadium will serve as a beacon for soccer’s future across the five boroughs, a permanent home for the club and symbol of the city’s long-term commitment to nurturing soccer players and fans alike for generations to come. Follow the stadium’s development here.
