Welcome to the latest instalment of It Is What It Is, the sister column to Adam Hurrey’s Football Cliches Podcast, a parallel mission into the heart of the tiny things in football you never thought really mattered… until you were offered a closer look.
Comic Sans and the Copa del Rey are acceptable typefaces for footballing.
The story began in 2010 at a Madrid jewellers owned and operated by Fernando Alegre. SevillaThe Copa del Rey winners, for the fifth consecutive time, were allowed to keep the trophy. Sr. Alegre will be engraving and making the new trophy. A 107-year-old competition deserves a serious trophy. Proper silverware. A large handle. It is a solid base.
But certainly not, as Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia put it at the time, the names of the past winners engraved in the style of “PowerPoint presentations made by schoolchildren, informal texts and obnoxious email chains”.
As Pawel Adamek, a Football Cliches podcast listener turned graphic designer discovered during a recent tour of Poland, there is a reason for this. Barcelona’s Camp Nou, that Madrid jeweller opted to inscribe Spanish football’s domestic cup in Comic Sans. A font (typeface, whatever) that has been so historically ridiculed that it’s actually become uncool to ridicule it.
Fittingly, the font’s creator, Vincent Connare — who designed it for Microsoft in 1994 — defended his typeface in the manner of an agitated, close-to-the-sack head coach, while also admitting its inherent inadequacy. “If you love Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography,” Connare sighed.
