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The NWSL has had its fair share of rough expansion team name drops.
In 2020, the name of the new Louisville team was leaked as Proof Louisville, a play on the region’s bourbon industry, before backlash led to a change to Racing Louisville.
In 2024, Boston unveiled Bos Nation FC, an anagram of Bostonian, along with a disastrous “Too Many Balls” campaign. The club quickly apologized and rebranded as the Boston Legacy.
The league’s upcoming expansion team in Atlanta—joining the NWSL in 2028 alongside Columbus—is trying to avoid that fate.
On Monday, the club announced its name as Atlanta City FC, along with a crest and branding full of nods to the Georgia capital.
“We did a lot of work to try to learn best practices from teams that came before us, the most recent expansion teams, and we just really tried to make sure that it was something that belonged to the city, to avoid some of those shortcomings,” chief business officer, Deandra Duggans, tells Front Office Sports.
The club surveyed and spoke with thousands of people about the team identity, Duggans says. The team went out to people who put down deposits to become season ticket holders, women’s sports fans, Atlanta sports fans, local influencers, and even Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens. An outside agency helped the club get started with research and interviews, but the team took over on the creative side.
“That was the name that gave us the most flexibility to include all of the elements that all of our fans said that they wanted,” Duggans says.
The crest has a phoenix in the center, matching the city’s official seal and flag. The phoenix rising from the ashes alludes to Atlanta’s history of rebuilding after being burned in the Civil War. Behind the phoenix is a dogwood blossom, and the team’s colors are red—matching the Braves, Falcons, Falcons, Hawks, and Atlanta United—and peach.
“It wasn’t created in a vacuum at all,” Duggans says. “Everything from the brand identity, from the name, the story behind it, came from listening and responding to fans and internal and external stakeholders. So it definitely adds a level of confidence that we got it right.”
Duggans says the fanbase “craves merch” and wants trendy, fashion-forward styles, leading the club to come out of the gate with collaborations with Togethxr and Peace Collective. “They don’t want things that they could just find at Dick’s Sporting Goods,” she says.
“City Football Club” is a common construction in global soccer, but less so in the United States, where one NWSL team goes by Angel City FC and no MLS teams end their names with “City FC.” (Two use “City SC.”)
Atlanta City FC falls under billionaire Home Depot founder Arthur Blank’s sports umbrella that also features the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and MLS’s Atlanta United. Blank, whose name appears on U.S. Soccer’s new national training center after donating $50 million to the project, paid a $165 million expansion fee for the new NWSL team.
The team is building a new training facility, and will play matches at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the home of the Falcons and United. While the venue can fit more than 70,000 fans for Falcons games, United has led MLS for years with roughly 40,000 people at its matches.
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