Rueter: Fans chose the Red Stars’ name years ago. Now, Chicago is leaving both behind

At a time when the Chicago Red Stars should be galvanizing fans before a postseason run, they’ve instead taken a polarizing alternative step.

When the Red Stars clinched a place in the 2024 NWSL playoffs on Oct. 13, their season proved a bounce back from last year’s failure to make the postseason. In his first season at the helm, head coach Lorne Donaldson has led a talented team — including Olympic gold medalists Mallory Swanson and Alyssa Naeher and international ballers such as Julia Grosso and Ludmila — back from the doldrums. There’s no denying Chicago has stars.

However, the rally behind the team just before the playoffs hit a self-inflicted speed bump. Wednesday, Chicago announced it is rebranding ahead of the 2025 season. Goodbye, Chicago Red Stars; hello, Chicago Stars.

For the name itself, it was a simple change: removing an adjective. But the removal of “Red” goes far deeper than semantics.

Chicago’s chief marketing officer, Kay Bradley, told the idea to rebrand began when Laura Ricketts purchased the club in August 2023. Then came some marketing jargon: “It felt like the right time to signify the future and all we believe that’s ahead of us from a progress perspective.”

Signifying the future by abandoning a name the fans chose at the start?

In 2008, a “name the team” campaign (orchestrated by one of the team’s founders, Peter Wilt, a self-proclaimed compulsive soccer team starter) asked local fans to give the new club an identity. The Red Stars wasn’t just one of many nominees; it won the popular vote.

“If Red Stars would have finished seventh, or even fifth, there is a good chance we would have gone with something else,” Wilt told the Chicago Tribune. “What truly influenced us was that Red Stars was popular with the broadest range of audience, including kids, young adults and parents.”

A lot of what fans come to support is transient. Every player and coach moves on or retires. Teams might leave their stadium for something new if greener pastures can be found. Owners sell their stakes and cash out (sometimes, as in this team’s case, for necessary culture-related reasons). Crests are bound to change, and that isn’t solely an American tradition these days — just look at recent badge changes from Juventus, Napoli and AS Roma, to fixate on Italy.

The new Stars logo is far more boring than the old Red Stars badge, replacing it with a badge you’d find atop a website of generic soccer crest templates. But that’s the lesser modification.

Name changes hit harder. In situations devoid of justifiable outcry about old, insensitive names, there better be a good reason to break continuity with your team’s history. The fans chose this name because red stars are synonymous with Chicago. As the Tribune wrote in 2008, “the team name is in honor of the four red stars on Chicago’s flag.”

Do you know what would embody Chicago soccer better than its fans? Are you sure? The mixed response on social media suggests otherwise.

When the other professional soccer team in Chicago rebranded — and then re-rebranded — in 2019, the Red Stars were revered for their design and meaning. Five years ago, the MLS franchise abandoned a similar color scheme to embrace … whatever the flame crown was supposed to be. The Fire reversed course soon after, returning to the light blue, red and white of the city.

Time will tell if Chicago’s NWSL franchise — no, I won’t call it by the new name while the Red Stars are still contending this season — will need to do the same. It seems unlikely.

“Often, people shorten our name to ‘Red Stars,’ and then the ‘Chicago’ goes away,” Bradley said. “So by removing ‘Red’ from the name, the short version will be ‘Chicago Stars’ so that we keep that connection with our city.”

The justification defies logic. When people don’t say a team’s city out loud, they don’t become an entity unmoored to geography. It’s a sign of familiarity, an earned cache. If I talk about “the Bulls” with my seat neighbor on the Blue Line, they’ll understand the team is from Chicago the same as they would on the L train in New York City.

Next season, fans and media members will refer to them as the Stars — no different from the NHL’s Dallas Stars, the old NASL Minnesota Stars or the Dominican University Stars that play 13 miles from the NWSL team’s stadium in Bridgeview. More so, aren’t Caleb Williams and Angel Reese their own kind of Chicago stars?

For the next month, supporters will be supporting the Red Stars knowing full well that next season will be played under a different name, as the change doesn’t take effect until 2025. Barring a change of heart, these will be the final games of the Red Stars era — the last time to shout their tried and true “Let’s go, Red Stars!” chant.

Changing a name is not the magic salve that’ll suddenly make fans come flocking in numbers previously unimaginable. This has been attempted before. This is not clever. “Red” wasn’t holding the club back.

The reasons your club isn’t a bigger deal in your market and beyond have little to do with the brand itself — and that’s a general address to any team that rebrands.

It’s because you haven’t embedded within your community to an extent that makes you essential. It’s because your games aren’t accessible enough to bring in more than the car-parking crowd. It’s because your team hasn’t accumulated the backlog of iconic moments that keeps you in city highlight reels. It’s because your roster pales in comparison to peers within the same league working under identical financial confines. It’s because thousands of clubs in countless leagues would also like to be important to pockets of the sport’s fans.

Your fans must now stress over the fact that the name they’ve spent hundreds of dollars on merchandise to support, that they’ve tattooed on their body, that has been the main character in some of their favorite memories, that they themselves named, has been ripped away from them.

Brands might just be pictures and names, but they play crucial roles in a fan’s relationship with the team. “(Team name) til I die” is a staple of modern supporter culture. Retroactively changing that name makes the link between fan and team that much less consistent.

The memories and feelings associated with that name are what keep fans from drifting to other teams. Don’t take the romantics for granted.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Chicago Red Stars, Soccer, NWSL

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