While the Colorado Rapids work to stand out on the field, the club has long struggled to define its identity off the pitch.
Tuesday, it announced a step toward clarity and alignment: a fan-driven effort to reimagine the brand and redesign the logo.
Results from December’s One Club, One Legacy fan survey showed that fans — from casual to die-hard — generally agree that certain aspects of the club’s brand don’t resonate with the Colorado market. The most common disconnect was the crest, which is currently a shield-shaped design with a soccer ball, mountain outlines and a wordmark. It was first released in 2007 when Dick’s Sporting Goods Park was opened.
When Chief Business Officer Haley Durmer joined the club last year and floated the idea of a potential rebrand, she said she heard similar questions both internally and externally about the club’s visual identity: “Whatap the purpose of the Rapids? What do we stand for? Whatap our identity?”
Concerning, she said, especially coming from inside the club. But for a team named after water, almost nothing about the brand, visually speaking, reflects it. Over time, the brand became “tired” and “forgotten” within the market, Durmer said. In broader terms, she admitted the crest doesn’t catch the eye when grouped with other MLS logos.
“You hear that from the public, itap like, ‘OK, we’re not doing a great job breaking through.’ But you hear that internally, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, how do we not know who we are?” Durmer said, reflecting on the club’s past positioning. “And I think itap because of how KSE (Kroenke Sports & Entertainment) was structured and how the Rapids were part of that ecosystem, but not part of the ecosystem, and a little bit of a forgotten franchise in ways.
“This is a way for us to reclaim that feeling.”
The survey aimed to capture how the fanbase perceives the club and its interest in a rebrand, and wasn’t limited to just the crest. A potential name change was also tossed around, but more than 5,000 quantitative and qualitative (focus-group) responses concluded a whopping 90% of fans identified with the club’s current namesake and didn’t want change.
The main colors, burgundy and blue, are also there to stay. Durmer invited the opportunity to add to the color palette with “energetic” colors to “create more life for the HD age.”
Ultimately, Durmer envisions a logo that feels like the Rapids.
“One of the things that has come up in conversation is that it doesn’t feel representative of this community,” she said. “People don’t see themselves, feel themselves, see their fandom. Soccer in Colorado has evolved so much over the last 30 years, and the fans of today, fans of yesteryear and even alumni don’t feel connected to the look. It just doesn’t represent them.
“I want people to look at that and say, ‘Not only is that Rapids, thatap Colorado and thatap me.”
The next piece of the puzzle is breaking through the market. Redefining the identity could help bring people in, but the club will hit hard on gameday experience and messaging to get them to stay.
This year, the club implemented a hyper-local array of food and beverage options at DSGP to make the stadium feel a bit more like home. For home wins, the club introduced a water cannon players fire off postgame that, if nothing else, calls back to the Rapids’ namesake.
The most recent MLS team to reimagine its logo was New York City FC in late 2024, which was more a case study in fine edits than a redesign. A year prior, the Seattle Sounders hit a home run with their 50th-anniversary redesign, which modernized and simplified an already-iconic badge nicely.
Durmer did not give a timeline for the Rapids’ reimagination, but fans shouldn’t expect a final product for a couple of years or more. The club’s contract with Adidas for jerseys complicates it a bit, since those designs are finalized for the next two seasons.
She did say some rough mockups have already been created, but were sent back to the drawing board. Fans will be involved at all stages for approval and opinions with more surveys and focus groups.
