Sporting Clube de Portugal gets a high-design rebrand inspired by the ’40s

FastCompany: When one of the world’s biggest sports clubs, Sporting Clube de Portugal (SCP), was founded in 1906, it was centered on one code: “Develop the human, then the athlete.” Now, 120 years later, the club is getting a major rebrand that brings that code to the forefront of its identity—with a high-design twist. SCP teaches sports including soccer , futsal, handball, volleyball, and rink hockey for everyone from young kids to elite adults. It’s best known for its men’s professional soccer team, which plays in the Primeira Liga (the top flight of Portuguese football), and has produced generational talents including Cristiano Ronaldo and Luís Figo.

This is the first time that SCP has rebranded in 25 years, and the overhaul—led by the global creative agency JKR —encompasses everything from the club’s official crest and typeface to its merch, jerseys, and digital presence. [Image: courtesy Sporting Clube de Portugal/JKR] According to André Bernardo, SCP’s chief strategy and operations officer, it’s a move driven by members, who collectively own and operate the club. For SCP members, “there’s something beyond sports as performance, which is sports as the first step to creating human connections and development—it’s this process of getting there,” Bernardo says.

Right now, the club has more than 180,000 members and 200 delegations across five continents. As it looks to expand even further globally in the coming years, members wanted its branding to position SCP as not just a sports club, but also a personal development community backed with deep heritage. [Image: courtesy Sporting Clube de Portugal/JKR] A 1945 crest gets a 2026 upgrade To reimagine SCP, JKR used a simple approach: Rather than inventing any modern assets, the team opted to retool the most iconic motifs from the brand’s history for modern applications.

That process started with combing through six years worth of research and interviews, conducted by Bernardo’s team, into members’ thoughts on the identity. The most important change that members asked for, Bernardo says, was a return of the brand’s 1945 crest. The crest featured the club’s roaring lion mascot inside a shield-shaped design made up of adjoining swirls. Although that element was replaced with a sleeker, more modern crest in 2001, most members felt that the 1945 version remained the more recognizable design.

[Image: courtesy Sporting Clube de Portugal/JKR] “If you look at a lot of the signage and tiles around Portugal, you do get a lot of those curvature shapes,” says Jennie Potts, creative director at JKR. JKR’s version of the lion looks like a near copy of the 1945 iteration, with a few aesthetic tweaks.

The mascot’s waist has been taken out, the patterns of its fur are now more curved than jagged, and its tail has been nudged into an “S” shape as an easter egg to reflect the word “Sporting.” [Image: courtesy Sporting Clube de Portugal/JKR] “We took all of the lions from all of the different logos that the club has had throughout the years, analyzed what was great about each one, and took the best from all of them,” Potts says. [Image: courtesy Sporting Clube de Portugal/JKR] Another nugget from the 1945 crest shapes the brand’s new bespoke typeface.

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The rebrand of a prominent sports club like Sporting Clube de Portugal is significant for the brand/design industry, as it showcases a blend of historical elements with modern identity strategies, making it relevant and actionable for brand strategy professionals.