The man who made football cool
What’s in a football shirt? It’s just some fabric that eleven people wear on a weekend. Some do it in a park with their mates, others in a cauldron surrounded by 70,000 people. The only thing that separates one piece of fabric from another is the identity given to it through club colours and the crest/logo/badge — whatever you want to call it — placed upon the shirt.
There is a yearning for the clear identity of the past in the modern game, where identity becomes increasingly blurred by commercial interests. Many of us crave nostalgia, a sense of history when those running the sport seem damned to forget the past as though it were a pre-enlightened era.
There is perhaps no better time than now to celebrate the man whose drawings changed the game when it comes to football shirts and branding: Piero Gratton. And that’s not just because his work is popping up across Italy once again.
Educated at art school in the Campo Marzio and a Roma fan, Gratton was working for state television station RAI as a graphic designer for their news channel in 1978 when AS Roma came looking for someone to design a logo to feature on the club’s gear for their upcoming tour of the US.
Shirts, jackets and everything in between, they needed to take advantage of the extraordinary circumstances of a US tour allowed Roma to experiment with a crest as CONI, the state’s Olympic governing body, limited the use of logos in football to the point that no side had their own ‘identity’ displayed on their shirts. The tour gave Gratton a chance to put something together. And what he delivered was something unforgettable: the Lupetto.
You know the one, the famous she-wolf of Rome, that iconic black logo the club have made an intrinsic part of their identity for more than forty years. Roma returned from that trip across the Atlantic inspired by American sports’ approach to marketing their teams. They weren’t heading back to the Eternal City and calling themselves the Roma She-Wolves, but they did start the branding revolution by sporting the Lupetto on their kits in 1978/79.
Roma’s new image was augmented further by creating a typographic identity with ‘AS Roma’ in Helvetica font, the letters ‘AS’ conjoined and monogrammed. Little did Gratton know he would not only launch the greatest branding exercise in Italian — and maybe European — football history while also kitting out hipsters for all eternity.
The usual tributes poured out from the football community when Gratton passed away in 2020 and one might have been forgiven for expecting a rake of commemorative shirts from Roma and the several other clubs — yes, there were others — that benefitted from his design skills. Except the Gratton influence never disappeared enough for Roma to hastily produce a half-baked memorial.
Even after Roma tried to ‘modernise’ in the late 1990s with a new logo that featured Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf, the Lupetto lived on in away shirts and training wear. Perhaps it was a consequence of its popularity or a move to placate fans, but it never went away.
It has featured heavily ever since, including the 2023/24 home shirt which might be the most Roman piece of clothing ever created. It had the Lupetto crest, those bold Roma colours and the SPQR ‘sponsor’, which stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus (or The Senate and People of Rome), the abbreviation that symbolises the Roman Republic and is engraved in countless public places across Rome.
Gratton’s work went beyond football clubs. Prior to the Lupetto, he designed the ticket for the 1976/77 European Cup final at Stadio Olimpico two years after his first project for Roma, creating a season ticket book with delightful artwork on the front.
While his other club work included logos for Bari, Ascoli, Cesena, Palermo, Pescara, Udinese and — to the chagrin of Romanisti — a contribution to Lazio’s Aquilotto logo with sports manufacturer Maurizio Pouchain, the prolific Gratton also designed the Euro ‘80 mascot Pinocchio and redesigned the UEFA logo on behalf of their vice-president Artemio Franchi, the legendary Fiorentina director.
And then you had Italia ‘90, where Gratton designed the packs for MS Mundial cigarettes which were given out in the press area at each match.
The timelessness of Gratton’s designs means that, in an age of nostalgia, those now retro logos are back in vogue but seem like they never left. Back in 1979/80, he designed Roma’s ‘ghiacciolo’ shirt, the ice lolly shirt. Roma’s 2020/21 home shirt rebooted that design forty years on from the team winning Coppa Italia in the original ghiacciolo, which also coincided with Gratton’s passing in April of that year. The 2020/21 away shirt also bore the Lupetto crest and the best bit is that both kits likely would have been signed off well in advance of that year.
Gratton’s work is synonymous with football culture and the kits that adorn his logos across various clubs thus ensure his place in the hearts of football fans, whether they’re aware of him or not.
The famous Bari ‘Galletto’, little rooster, logo designed by Gratton in 1979 was so popular with the club’s fans that the redesign after bankruptcy was almost more infuriating than the fact the club had briefly gone out of business.
The Galletto embodies how important identity is to football fans. It reminds them of great days, like when Phil Masinga beat Inter or Antonio Cassano scored his debut goal at San Nicola, also against Inter. Poor Inter.
Bari’s rooster. Ascoli’s woodpecker. Roma’s little wolf. Gratton was inspired by the US sports teams with their eagles and dolphins, which prompted this animal kingdom-themed revolution in the late 70s/early 80s.
The dolphin was an easy move for Delfino Pescara, given that the animal is in the name, albeit in Italian. His crest for the Abruzzo club lasts to this day and although outsiders may see it as kooky, it’s treasured by fans and appreciated by the purist, much like his ‘Zebretta’ at Udinese which came back for 2023/24 but featured on a woeful home shirt.
The Zebretta, like most of Gratton’s club logos, resonated so strongly because of the link with Pouchain, the kit manufacturer. That iconic style, the jersey effect and embroidery of those Pouchain kits gave the eccentric, brave logos a little more class and substance, while the more commercially minded and synthetic shirts of the 2020s often risk detracting from what is considered graphic design with its shiny, almost knock-off look.
A prime example of that is Palermo’s 2024/25 third shirt which features Gratton’s sharp eagle logo of 1979. It’s the piece of Gratton’s work that evokes American sport the most, so it’s perhaps not a total crime against football that the Palermo shirt features the sponsor Old Wild West, a barbecue joint popular in Italy. But the sponsor does look horrendous on a shirt. Old Wild West are one of Serie B’s sponsors this year and it genuinely has the feel of an off brand Pro Evolution Soccer sponsor.
Once your sharp intake of breath subsides, Palermo’s effort is still a nice shirt even if you’re hoping it lives up to modern reputation and the sponsor peels off almost immediately after washing.
The Gratton ‘revival’ has continued into this season with Cesena rebooting the crest he designed for their 1980/81 shirts. Their away kit features the reimagined seahorse that gives the club its nickname ‘Cavalluccio’.
Harking back to 1980/81 is a play on nostalgia given the season ended with Cesena promoted to Serie A, something they’ll be hoping to achieve again this year.
More than five years have passed since Piero Gratton left us but the legacy of his work lives on. Of course it does, because his contribution to football was truly brilliant and evokes memories of an innovative era in the game.
Whether you like the contemporary designs or prefer Gratton’s artistry, it’s impossible to deny the lasting cultural impact those logos/badges/crests (or identities) have had on the clubs that adorned them.
As Italian clubs scramble to find new ways to market themselves in a Premier League dominated world, perhaps leaning into the cult of Gratton might make them a few quid in merchandising as they sell their stuff to hopeless football romantic hipsters. Like me. And maybe you, if you’ve read this far.