Brand/Rebrand: Canal del Fútbol (CDF)
Chile’s one and only professional soccer channel gets a rebrand connecting its viewers’ emotions, histories and identity.
by Justin W. Sanders
Imagine if one American television network had the broadcast rights to every game played by the NFL. Every Sunday game. Every Thursday night game. Every Monday Night Football game. Every preseason game, every London-based game, every playoff game and every Super Bowl. The entirety of the biggest sport in the USA, aired on a single channel.
Now, imagine winning the bid to design that channel’s new identity and you’ll have an idea of what motion graphics and VFX company Believehad on its plate when it did the recent rebrand for Chile’s one-and-only professional soccer network, CDF (Canal del Fútbol).
“The only way to watch a [soccer] game here in Chile is through CDF,” said Marcelo Stephani, executive producer for Believe. “They have different teams of people that go all over the country filming every single game. In a weekend, you could have 12–15 games between Friday and Sunday.”
CDF and Chile’s top soccer league, Asociación Nacional de Fútbol Profesional, struck their exclusive deal in 2005, making this year the channel’s 10th anniversary. Additionally, “we hosted the America Cup,” said Stephani, which, after the World Cup, is “probably the second or third biggest cup in soccer.”
So it was a big year for a big network, and the time had come “to develop new ground rules for our visual identity for all our formats and devices,” said Rodrigo Hernandez, director of marketing for CDF. But this new system wouldn’t only be about uniting a major sports media brand across multiple platforms. The rebrand had to unite an entire nation of soccer fan as passionate about their sport as Americans are about the NFL.
The finality of CDF’s position in Chilean soccer is reflected by its very logo, which ends, somewhat unusually, with a period, as though to say, “that’s it. We are the soccer channel. End of story.” Believe worked on everything from show packages to internal business cards for CDF, but “we didn’t touch the logo,” said Stephani. The logo is set. Period.
However, within the parameters of the pre-set logo and its period, also known as “the dot,” lay worlds of design opportunities.
“The dot… is more than a graphic element,” said Hernandez. “The dot is a key element in all the communications here at CDF. It’s a container that allows us to unify all our applications, and at the same time it transforms itself due to its content, you can stretch it, it communicates.”
Stephani’s team began to see the dot as something that, “if you stretch it, could come alive,” he said. Its slightly irregular shape could be blown up into a soccer field, for instance, or stretched out into a goal line, or the elongated shape of Chile itself. Stephani translated for Brief a portion of the pitch to CDF that describes Believe’s vision for the dot, and it reads like poetry:
“The dot is an opinion, an idea. If you stretch it, it’s a line. It’s a square. It’s the poster of your team on the wall. It’s the box of your memories, the box of your shoes, the feel of the earth. It’s the small area where everything happens in soccer, where you get near to the goalkeeper. It’s a love letter. It’s a card. It’s a window. And finally, the dot is where everyone is born and where everything ends.”
Starting at the level of the dot contains the somewhat overwhelming status of CDF’s place in Chilean culture to a specific, and therefore manageable, design element. From that starting point, Believe found ways to wrap the dot around its entire rebrand of CDF, and it materializes in cool and interesting ways across the channel. Take, for instance, the anthem spot seen below (and above), in which the dot is expressed in the panels that float behind the main action, depicting images of Chile and its people:
In front of the panels, an exciting story unfolds of a youngster rising from humble beginnings to become a world-class soccer player. Told entirely through a series of still, trophy-like images, the narrative reflects a game that “is like a dream for some people,” said Stephani. “You hear a lot of stories here in Chile about how the most famous soccer players around came from very humble beginnings. We chose for this one a player called Alexis Sanchez… He came from a little town here in the north of Chile, started playing soccer and it was a way for him to get out of that place and achieve something greater for himself and his family.”
Believe considered “animating in 3D,” said Stephani, but soon realized that a more statuesque approach produced a more epic feel for the ident. Something about trophies, he continued, evokes “heroes in ancient times that are turned into statues eventually… it shows the greatness of the game in a 30-second piece.”
The results reflect CDF’s position as a transmitter of a game that is both the most important sport in Chile and “part of our popular culture,” said Hernandez. “It starts at the neighborhoods as a game, and it transforms into a passion for a team… We connect people with soccer as a way to connect our country with it own emotions, histories and identity.”
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