Celtic’s badge: An element of mystery but a symbol of club’s Irish connections (2024)

What is a badge in any case? It’s a complicated question to answer.

Perhaps your football club’s most ubiquitous symbol is a storied, heraldic design harking back to the local coat of arms or a sleek, modern design dreamt up to look effortlessly slick emblazoned on modern sportswear.

But why is there a tree? Or a bee? Or a devil? Uh, is that an elephant? SQUIRRELS!!

The Athletic is breaking down the details hiding in plain sight and explaining what makes your club badge.

Those with even a passing knowledge of British football will know Celtic are a Scottish club with deep Irish roots.

Their badge is a striking four-leaf clover, a plant which Celtic (as in Celts, with a hard “K” sound, not the soft “S” of the club’s name) tradition believed to portend luck, mercy and faith. It is a symbol still associated with Ireland today and is the most obvious touchstone for the club’s Irish history. The crest’s green and white colours reinforce the connection as they make up, with orange, the Republic of Ireland’s flag. But its origin is perhaps more complicated.

Step into this time machine here and you will find yourself transported to the east end of Glasgow in 1887.

Enter this church, St Mary’s, and listen in upon a meeting led by Catholic priest Brother Walfrid. You will hear him organising initiatives to alleviate child poverty and hunger in the area, as part of his charity the “poor children’s dinner table”.

Walfrid was a member of the Marist Brothers order of Catholic priests, a group dedicated to helping neglected young people.

Inspired by the example of Hibernian Football Club around Leith, the port district of Edinburgh where poor Irish immigrants had similarly made their homes, Walfrid proposed creating a football club as a way to raise funds and feed those in need. “A football club will be formed for the maintenance of dinner tables for the children and the unemployed,” was formally decreed.

The club was named Celtic to celebrate the shared cultural heritage between Scotland and Ireland — just 12 miles of sea apart at their closest points — which dates back millennia; a heritage that manifested in these Irish immigrants creating new homes across the water, just as their ancestors might have made the reverse journey countless generations before.

Yet Celtic’s first crest was not the four-leaf clover, but a Celtic (that hard “K” again) cross set on a red oval background. Brian Wilson, in his book Celtic: A History With Honour, says that exact design was a Marist Brothers symbol.

Their first official match was in May 1888, a 5-2 win over fellow Glasgow side Rangers, who of course they became fast friends with and have remained so ever since.

The strip they wore that day — green collar on an otherwise all-white shirt, green socks and black shorts — established the general colours of their 134-year history, if not the hooped shirt design that has become world famous. That would make its debut against Partick Thistle in 1903, while the plain white socks that are the norm now were introduced in the 1960s.

It would also take almost a century before their official crest actually made it onto their matchday jerseys, for 1977-78 — the last season of European Cup-winning coach Jock Stein’s 13-year reign as manager. By that stage, it had evolved from the Celtic cross to the clover of today.

However, the four-leaf clover was used in official documentation as early as the 1930s — there is a photo of the menu from the club’s Golden Jubilee dinner in 1938, and it features the clover.

When Willie Maley, who managed Celtic for 43 years and won 30 major trophies between 1897 and 1940, published his history of the club in the year of the golden jubilee, though, he included the Celtic cross as the club’s badge, creating something of a contradiction.

The clover design’s precise origin is not entirely clear, and mystery and ambiguity are something of a running theme.

Interestingly, the clover was a symbol the club used for years before they formally adopted it as their crest.

A book by football writer Roy Hay — The Story Of A Footballer, about his grandfather James, who captained Celtic in their earlier years — includes photographic evidence that the club designed and self-issued medals for the players featuring the four-leaf clover in 1908. Decades before it became their official crest, those medals were to commemorate the club winning the league, the Scottish Cup and the now-defunct Glasgow Cup and Glasgow Charity Cup competitions in that season.

This is believed to be the first recorded instance of the four-leaf clover relating to Celtic.

One theory is that rather than being down to the four-leaf clover’s association with luck and faith as is assumed, its use is because of that 1907-08 quadruple — four trophies, four leaves. Although, there is no definitive evidence that this is the case.

This is only an educated guess but it is potentially a combination of the two; the quadruple medal design was considered so ingenious, given the double meaning of the clover’s broader associations, that it stuck around and eventually displaced the Celtic cross.

The Celtic cross has not vanished totally from use, however.

There was a brief return to the cross for the 1987-88 and 1988-89 seasons, to commemorate the club’s centenary, with that badge still featuring a small clover at the bottom. For the club’s 125th anniversary a decade ago, their third kit’s badge also used the Celtic cross, this time as part of a shirt that harked back to the ones worn for that first official game — a green crest adorning a plain white torso with a black collar.

As these nostalgia-inflected kits signify, Celtic are deeply proud of both their own history and the cultural connection between Scotland and Ireland which inspired their founding. That is reflected by their crests throughout time.

Now we just need to wait 15 years to see what design they come up with for the club’s 150th anniversary.

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)

Author’s Note

This is my final article for The Athletic. From the bottom of my heart, I want to express my gratitude for you good people subscribing and reading. I’ve loved writing these pieces and chatting to you in comment sections and match discussions, and I hope you found at least some insight or entertainment here in turn. Here’s to a great season still to come. Kieran.

Kieran Devlin is a football journalist and Celtic fan originally from and now returned to Glasgow after a seven-year loan spell in England. Ex-contributor to Celtic fansite 90 Minute Cynic. Previously written about football, music and culture for places such as The Guardian, The Independent, Dazed, i-D and DJ Mag. Follow Kieran on Twitter @NoNotThatDevlin