On Thursday ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that, for the time being, Washington’s NFL team will lose the name “Redskins” but not yet embrace a new nickname, simply going by the Washington Football Team for the time being.
This is most likely just a way to buy time until they get a new nickname through the trademark process and produce a lot of merchandise. The team will play with just the name Washington on the jersey, and the player number on every helmet, for the time being.
They undoubtedly look cool — plus lets the team create even more merchandise to sell in the process. (In theory, Washington could get fans buying old jerseys for nostalgia purposes, temporary jerseys for novelty factor, and new jerseys in the span of a year. This is grotesque and I’m sure their marketing department is loving it.)
Anyway, that’s not why I am writing this blog: I am writing to say that they should forget Football Team, change it to Football Club, and go by Washington FC.
Why? I have no reason, other than that I want to see what happens. I feel like it’ll either be beloved and quirky, or it will create a singularity of hate where soccer fans and American football fans will join together in a mass of disgust and stay up for days on end, possibly in shifts, screaming about it on Twitter.
It’s all or nothing. That team either becomes a funky oddity that is adopted as the NFL team of Great Britain, or it leads to some kind of declaration of war from Premier League fans.
We’ve decried all these MLS teams going with City + FC for their team names (most recently with Charlotte) … but an NFL team? I have no idea. That’s where things get interesting.
Let’s take a ride into the unknown, Dan Snyder. Let’s make some memories.
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