Anniversary seasons in football often lean heavily on nostalgia.
A commemorative badge. A heritage kit. A season-long look through the archives. A chance to remember the names, games and moments that shaped a club’s history.
For Exeter City, its 125th anniversary has become something more meaningful.
The club is not simply using the milestone to celebrate where it has been. It’s using it to define where it wants to go next.
Built around the phrase “Our City, Our Club, Our Way”, Exeter City’s new vision is an attempt to capture what makes the club different: its connection to the city, its supporter-owned model and its commitment to growing without losing sight of its identity.
For a club that has experienced a difficult 12 months off the pitch, including financial challenges, the timing matters. This is not just a visual refresh or a one-season campaign. Internally, it’s being treated as a reset.
“I think an anniversary like this naturally gives you an opportunity to stop and take stock,” says Scott Palfrey, Exeter City’s Social Media and Media Manager. “We have 125 years of history behind us, but the important thing is what we do with the next 125 years.”
That line captures the central tension of the project.
How does a football club honour its past without becoming trapped by it? How does it build a future-facing vision while protecting the characteristics that made it special in the first place? And how does a supporter-owned club tell that story in a way that feels authentic to the people who quite literally own part of it?
For Exeter City, the answer starts with clarity.
More Than An Anniversary
The phrase “Our City, Our Club, Our Way” is deliberately simple, but for Exeter it carries weight.
“Our City” speaks to place. Exeter City is not a club that happens to be based in Exeter. Its relationship with the city is fundamental to how it sees itself. The club’s identity is tied to the place it represents, the people who support it and the wider community around it.
“Our Club” reflects something even more distinctive. Exeter City has been majority-owned by its Supporters’ Trust since 2003, making supporter ownership a central part of the club’s modern history. It is not a recent brand positioning exercise. It is the operating reality of the football club.
“Exeter City wouldn’t exist without talking about supporter ownership,” says Palfrey. “The Supporters’ Trust has been the majority shareholder since 2003, so it’s not something that’s been added to our identity recently. It has shaped the club for more than 20 years through ups and downs.”
That creates a different relationship between the club and its supporters.
From a communications perspective, Exeter is not simply speaking to fans. It is speaking to people with a direct stake in the future of the organisation.
“The vision needed to recognise that and put supporters at the centre of the story,” Palfrey adds. “Ultimately, ‘Our Club’ really does mean our club.”
The final part, “Our Way”, is perhaps the most interesting from a football business perspective.
In an era where clubs are often encouraged to scale, commercialise and benchmark themselves against bigger organisations, Exeter is choosing a different tone. The message is not anti-ambition. It is about ambition on its own terms.
“We don’t have to be the biggest club or try to copy somebody else,” says Palfrey. “We can be ambitious while still being true to ourselves.”
For Exeter, that distinction matters. The club wants to grow, but not by stripping away the things that make it recognisable.
Designing A Club’s Next Chapter
If the vision gives Exeter its strategic language, the anniversary identity gives it a visual form.
That responsibility fell to designer Finley Sutherns, who had previously worked with the club and was brought into the project through his relationship with Palfrey.
The original brief, though, was far more straightforward.
“The board initially wanted a straightforward adaptation of the club’s current primary crest, recoloured entirely in gold to mark the 125th anniversary of the club’s foundation,” says Sutherns.
For many clubs, that may have been enough. A gold crest. A set of anniversary assets. A clean campaign for the season.
But Sutherns saw an opportunity to do something more considered.
“I felt this was a perfect opportunity to create something much more bespoke,” he says. “The 125th anniversary is a huge milestone in the club’s history, so why not celebrate it properly?”
As the project developed, it became more than an anniversary mark. The board later decided that a full-colour version of the new design, incorporating the new vision, would be used as the club’s primary crest throughout the 2026/27 season.
That shift added another layer of importance. The identity now had to carry both the anniversary and the wider vision.
It had to feel celebratory, but not temporary. Distinctive, but not disconnected. Modern, but still recognisably Exeter City.
“Finding the perfect balance between preserving the heritage and retaining what fans already know, love and connect with is hugely important to me in any project of this nature,” says Sutherns. “You don’t want to strip things back so much that you lose important elements, but you also don’t want to overcomplicate the design and end up with something that becomes difficult to use.”
That balance shaped the final direction.
The project was never intended to be a full redesign. The aim was to build on the club’s existing identity, not replace it. After several iterations and feedback from Palfrey and the Trust Board, the team landed on an option with the shield at the heart of the design.
For Sutherns, it felt like the right compromise: enough of a change to mark the significance of the moment, while still retaining the identity supporters already recognise.
The Details That Give Identity Meaning
The strongest identity projects in football are often defined by the details.
For Exeter City’s anniversary identity, one of the most important details was the typeface.
Sutherns chose Alverata, a typeface by Gerard Unger with roots in Romanesque inscription lettering. Its influence comes from historic letterforms carved into stone across medieval Europe, giving it a sense of permanence, craft and commemoration.
That mattered because the project was not just about making something look premium. It was about creating an identity that felt connected to Exeter itself.
“The Romanesque influences within Alverata echo elements of Exeter Cathedral and the city’s wider architectural heritage,” says Sutherns. “It created a subtle relationship between the club, the city and its identity.”
The typography became part of the story. It helped connect the anniversary mark to the city’s architecture, history and sense of place.
There was similar thinking behind the “1901–2026” ribbon at the bottom of the crest. Rather than adding a generic date ribbon, Sutherns drew inspiration from the “Semper Fidelis” ribbon within the club’s primary shield crest, itself connected to the city’s coat of arms.
It’s the sort of detail that many people may not consciously notice at first glance, but it helps the identity feel rooted rather than decorative.
“Every element of the identity felt intentional and bespoke,” says Sutherns.
That’s particularly important in football, where design work carries a different level of emotional weight.
A crest is not just a mark. It sits on shirts, scarves, flags, signage, social graphics and, most importantly, in the memories of supporters. It represents family traditions, matchday routines and years of emotional investment.
“A football crest isn’t just a logo,” says Sutherns. “For many supporters, their club is a huge part of their lives. The crest carries a huge amount of meaning, pride and emotional attachment, so it’s incredibly important to get it right.”
That pressure becomes even greater at a supporter-owned club.
Exeter City’s identity does not belong solely to a boardroom or a brand department. It belongs to the supporters who have helped shape the club’s modern story.
“You want to create something that supporters can emotionally connect with and ultimately feel proud to call their own,” Sutherns adds.
Making The Vision Visible
The challenge now is making sure the vision does not become a slogan that appears on a wall, a social graphic or the end of a campaign video.
For Exeter City, the anniversary season is the launch point, but the ambition is for the vision to be felt across the club.
From a media perspective, that means telling stories that show the connection between the club, the city and its supporters. It means using the anniversary to introduce younger fans to parts of Exeter’s history they may not know, while also creating new memories for the next generation.
The club is running a history video series with its historians, telling stories from across its 125 years. Palfrey points to moments such as the club’s name change in 1904, becoming the first team to play the Brazilian national team in 1914, and holding Manchester United to a goalless draw in 2005, a result that played a part in saving the club.
But the purpose is not simply to look back.
“History is most interesting when you can connect it to the present,” says Palfrey. “The best way to celebrate 125 years is to create memories for the next generation.”
That idea is central to the wider project.
On matchdays, the vision can show up in how people are welcomed into St James Park. In the community, it can show up through the work of Exeter City and City Community Trust beyond the football pitch. In content, it can show up through the stories of players, staff, supporters, volunteers, partners and the wider community.
The anniversary badge and strapline have already been brought into stadium branding, while the wider identity system has been applied across social media graphics, signage and other club touchpoints.
For Sutherns, flexibility was a key consideration. Because the identity incorporates Exeter City’s primary crest, which had to remain untouched, he developed a series of supporting marks that could work alongside it or independently where the full crest was not appropriate.
“The aim was to make sure everything felt like part of the same overall identity, while giving each element enough flexibility to serve its own purpose,” he says.
That flexibility is what allows the identity to move beyond a single badge. It becomes a system, capable of supporting a season-long story.
A Different Kind Of Football Club Story
There is a broader point here about how football clubs tell stories about themselves.
So much of modern football is framed around scale. Bigger audiences. Bigger investment. Bigger commercial growth. Bigger ambition.
Exeter City’s 125th anniversary vision offers a different kind of message.
The club is not trying to position itself as something it is not. It is not chasing a generic version of football modernity. Instead, it is leaning into the things that already give it meaning: its city, its supporters and its way of operating.
“I hope people see a club that knows who it is, what it stands for and where it is heading,” says Palfrey.
For supporters, the hope is that they see themselves reflected in the vision. For partners, it is a reminder that working with Exeter City is about more than brand visibility. It is an opportunity to be part of something rooted in community. For people outside the club, it is an invitation to ask what “Our City, Our Club, Our Way” really means.
That may be the most effective part of the whole project.
The anniversary gives Exeter City a platform. The identity gives it a look and feel. But the vision gives it a story that can travel beyond one season.
For Sutherns, one detail still stands out above the rest: the typeface.
“I don’t think I could have made a more appropriate choice than Alverata,” he says. “Seeing it now being used around the stadium, across the 2026/27 social media graphics and throughout the wider identity has only reinforced that decision for me.”
“It just feels like Exeter City.”
That is ultimately the point.
The best club identities do not just mark a moment. They make a club feel more like itself.
For Exeter City, 125 years of history has not become an exercise in nostalgia. It has become a chance to say, with greater clarity, who the club is, what it stands for and how it wants to move forward.
Our City. Our Club. Our Way.
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