English Football Club Nicknames and Where They Come From

There is a caged song thrush on the crest at The Hawthorns, a bird that has nothing to do with football and everything to do with a public house in West Bromwich where the club's early committee met. There is a fox on Leicester City's badge because Leicestershire was hunting country. There is a canary on Norwich City's because Flemish and Walloon weavers who settled in the city in the sixteenth century brought a taste for breeding them.

English football club nicknames are, almost without exception, older than the marketing departments that now print them on training kit. They come from trades that no longer exist, from birds kept in cages behind stands that have been demolished, and in a surprising number of cases from insults thrown by rival supporters and then adopted out of stubbornness. Very few were chosen. Most were acquired.

Nicknames from the trades that built the towns

The largest single category in English football is occupational, and it maps almost exactly onto the industrial geography of the country in the 1880s and 1890s, when most of these clubs were formed.

Sheffield United are the Blades because Sheffield made cutlery and edge tools, an industry that gave the city its stainless steel reputation and its trade marks. Northampton Town are the Cobblers because Northamptonshire was the centre of English boot and shoe manufacture, supplying the army for generations. Walsall are the Saddlers from the Black Country leather trade, which made harness and saddlery for a horse-drawn economy. Wycombe Wanderers are the Chairboys because High Wycombe and the Chiltern beechwoods produced most of the chairs in England — the Windsor chair industry employed thousands of turners working in the woods themselves.

Luton Town and Stockport County are both the Hatters, from two entirely separate hat industries: straw plait in Bedfordshire, felt in Cheshire. Neither borrowed from the other.

Grimsby Town are the Mariners, from what was for a period the largest fishing port in the world, though the club has played at Blundell Park in Cleethorpes rather than in Grimsby itself for well over a century — a discrepancy that gives visiting supporters something to sing about. Scunthorpe United are the Iron, from the steelworks that dominated the town. Rotherham United are the Millers, from corn milling on the Don.

Stoke City are the Potters, which requires no explanation in England and considerable explanation everywhere else: the six towns of the Staffordshire Potteries, federated as Stoke-on-Trent in 1910, produced the bone china that the word Staffordshire still means to collectors.

Crewe Alexandra are the Railwaymen. Crewe existed as a town almost entirely because the Grand Junction Railway put its locomotive works there in 1840, and the works employed most of the men who founded the football club.

Yeovil Town are the Glovers, from a Somerset leather glove trade that was still substantial within living memory.

And Arsenal are the Gunners for the most literal reason of all: the club was formed in 1886 by workers at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, which manufactured ordnance for the British Army. West Ham United are the Hammers from the rivetting hammers of the Thames Ironworks shipyard at Canning Town, where the club began in 1895 — a derivation covered further in our London derbies guide.

Nicknames taken from the shirt

35%15%15%15%15%

• Trade and industry14
• Colours and kit6
• Animals and badges6
• Place and civic6
• Disputed origin6
• Given by rivals2

The forty clubs listed in the table further down this page, classified by this page's own reading of each origin. It is a sample chosen to illustrate the categories, not a survey of all 92 clubs, and several nicknames could reasonably sit in two of these groups.

Show the numbers

Where 40 English club nicknames come from

Item	Value
Trade and industry	14
Colours and kit	6
Animals and badges	6
Place and civic	6
Disputed origin	6
Given by rivals	2

The second big group is the simplest. A club plays in a colour, the colour gets a name, the name sticks.

Burnley are the Clarets, from a shade of deep red named after the wine of Bordeaux, adopted in the early 1900s in imitation of Aston Villa, who were then the most successful club in England. Newcastle United are the Magpies from black and white stripes, as are Notts County, independently. Blackpool are the Tangerines. Hull City are the Tigers, from amber and black stripes rather than from any Yorkshire connection with tigers. Queens Park Rangers are the Hoops, which is what English football calls horizontal bands as opposed to vertical stripes — a distinction that matters enormously to kit historians and to nobody else.

Nottingham Forest are the Garibaldi Reds, and the origin is worth setting out because it is the best story in the category. The club, formed in 1865, adopted red shirts in honour of Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose redshirts had unified Italy and who was a popular hero in Britain. Forest later donated a set of those red shirts to a young club in Woolwich, which is one reason Arsenal play in red to this day.

Coventry City are the Sky Blues by deliberate design rather than accident. Jimmy Hill, appointed manager in 1961, changed the club's colours to sky blue as part of a wholesale rebranding that also produced a club song set to the tune of the Eton Boating Song and one of the first attempts in England to market a football club as a modern brand. It worked. Nobody now remembers what Coventry wore before.

The relationship between colours and nicknames runs both ways, and our guide to why English clubs wear their colours covers the other direction — cases where the nickname arrived first and the kit followed it.

The animals, and the badges they came from

Sheffield Wednesday are the Owls, and the derivation is geographical rather than ornithological: the club moved to Owlerton in 1899, and the district's name produced the nickname. The owl on the badge came afterwards. Wednesday itself is older and stranger — the club grew out of the Wednesday Cricket Club, formed in 1820 by tradesmen whose half-day off fell on a Wednesday.

Leicester City are the Foxes from Leicestershire's hunting country, home of the Quorn and the Fernie. The club were originally Leicester Fosse, after the Roman Fosse Way that runs through the county.

Norwich City are the Canaries because Norwich had a canary-breeding tradition brought by refugee weavers, and because the club's older nickname — the Citizens — was replaced by one that fitted the yellow shirts. Both halves of the explanation matter; the bird and the colour arrived at the same conclusion from different directions.

West Bromwich Albion are the Throstles, from the song thrush, and a live thrush in a cage was for many years kept at the ground. Millwall are the Lions, a name attached during an FA Cup run at the turn of the twentieth century when a small club knocked out larger ones. Bradford City are the Bantams, from a bantam cock, adopted in the early twentieth century and reinforced by claret and amber.

Huddersfield Town are the Terriers, a comparatively modern nickname built around the Yorkshire terrier and now attached to a live mascot. Crystal Palace are the Eagles for reasons covered in the next section, having previously been something entirely different.

What unites the group is that the badge and the nickname reinforce each other until nobody can say which came first. That relationship is set out at length in our guide to English football club crests.

Place, parish and civic pride

Southampton are the Saints because the club was founded in 1885 by members of St Mary's Church Young Men's Association, and their ground, opened in 2001, is called St Mary's. The nickname has outlasted the church connection by more than a century.

Plymouth Argyle are the Pilgrims, from the Mayflower's departure from Plymouth in 1620 — a fact of national history turned into a football nickname. The Argyle part of the club's name is itself disputed, with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and a Plymouth street both claimed as the source.

Chesterfield are the Spireites, from the twisted spire of the Church of St Mary and All Saints, which is genuinely and visibly crooked and is the town's only nationally known feature. Mansfield Town are the Stags, from Sherwood Forest. Barnsley are the Tykes, from a Yorkshire term for a Yorkshireman that was originally uncomplimentary.

Reading are the Royals, from the Royal County of Berkshire — and this is one of English football's clearest nickname replacements. Reading were the Biscuitmen, after the Huntley & Palmers works that made the town internationally known, until the factory's decline made the name a memorial rather than a description.

Leeds United are the Peacocks, which almost nobody outside Leeds knows and which comes from the Old Peacock, a public house opposite the ground. Elland Road was known as the Old Peacock Ground before Leeds City, and then Leeds United, played there.

Portsmouth are Pompey, and here the honest answer is that nobody knows. The competing accounts include a naval vessel called the Pompée, a fire station, a navigation mark on Admiralty charts, and a story about a group of Portsmouth sailors climbing Pompey's Pillar in Alexandria. None is documented well enough to settle it, and the club has sensibly never tried.

The nicknames that changed

Nicknames are not permanent, and the cases where one replaced another usually mark a moment when a club deliberately reinvented itself.

Crystal Palace were the Glaziers, from the glass of the Crystal Palace, until Malcolm Allison arrived at Selhurst Park in the early 1970s, changed the strip to red and blue stripes on a Benfica model, and rebranded the club as the Eagles. It was a conscious marketing act, and it worked completely — the Glaziers are now a historical footnote.

Chelsea were the Pensioners, after the scarlet-coated residents of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, and a Chelsea Pensioner appeared on the club badge for decades. Ted Drake removed him in the 1950s as part of modernising the club, and Chelsea became simply the Blues.

Sunderland were the Rokerites, from Roker Park, and could not remain so after moving grounds in 1997. The Black Cats was chosen by a supporters' vote, drawing on a black cat that appears in an early twentieth-century team photograph and on the Black Cat Battery on the Wear.

Manchester United were the Heathens as Newton Heath LYR, the railway works side that became United in 1902, then the Busby Babes in the 1950s, and only became the Red Devils in the 1960s — a name borrowed from the Salford rugby league club, who had acquired it on a French tour in the 1930s. Three nicknames in seventy years, each attached to a different version of the club.

Reading's transition from Biscuitmen to Royals belongs here too, as does Leicester's from the Fosse to the Foxes.

The pattern in every case is the same mechanism working at different speeds. A nickname anchored to a building, a ground or an employer survives exactly as long as the thing it is anchored to. When the ground closes or the factory shuts, the nickname either becomes a memorial or it gets replaced.

Non-league nicknames, where the meaning is still local

Below the Football League, nicknames tend to be more literal and more locally legible, because the clubs are smaller and the trades are closer.

Stourbridge are the Glassboys, from the Black Country glass industry — the cone at Wordsley is still standing and the glass trade is part of the district's identity, as our guide to the Black Country derby sets out. Wealdstone are the Stones, a simple contraction. Dulwich Hamlet are the Hamlet, likewise.

Kettering Town are the Poppies, Hednesford Town are the Pitmen from the Cannock Chase coalfield, and Corby Town are the Steelmen from the works that drew thousands of Scottish families to Northamptonshire in the 1930s.

These names function differently from Premier League nicknames. At Step 3 or Step 4 of the pyramid, the nickname is not a merchandise asset; it is what the club is called in the local paper and in the clubhouse. It carries information about the town that a supporter in the ground actually possesses. When Hednesford supporters call themselves the Pitmen, some of them are describing their grandfathers.

Non-league also preserves nicknames the Football League has lost. Clubs that folded or fell out of the League took their names with them, and in several cases a phoenix club or a neighbouring side has picked them up.

The ones the rivals gave them

A small but conspicuous group of English nicknames were coined as insults and then adopted.

Bristol Rovers are the Gas, or Gasheads, from a gasworks that stood beside their old Eastville ground. Bristol City supporters used it as an insult about the smell. Rovers supporters took it, put it on flags, and now use it as the club's primary self-description — the classic English response to being mocked.

Ipswich Town are the Tractor Boys, which was not coined in Suffolk. Opposition supporters used it to characterise Ipswich as rural and provincial during the club's Premier League seasons around the turn of the century, and it was adopted with a shrug. The club's own traditional nickname is the Blues, or simply Town, and older Ipswich supporters will still use those.

The adoption mechanism is worth understanding because it recurs. An insult works only while the target resents it. English football crowds worked this out very early, and the standard counter-move — singing the insult yourself, louder — disarms it within about two seasons.

There is a boundary here that matters. Nicknames that rivals use about a club without the club adopting them are not nicknames; they are abuse, and several in circulation are genuinely offensive rather than merely rude. This page does not treat those as part of the same category, and no reputable club history does either.

Into the songs, and onto the merchandise

Once a nickname is established it starts to do work, and the first place it shows up is the singing.

Southampton's anthem is Oh When the Saints Go Marching In, which exists as a Southampton song only because of a Victorian church youth association in the parish of St Mary. Norwich have On the Ball, City, generally held to be the oldest football song still in regular use in England and older than most of the clubs in the Football League, and the canary imagery attached itself to it afterwards. Coventry's Sky Blue Song, written to the tune of the Eton Boating Song during Jimmy Hill's rebrand, is the clearest example of a nickname and an anthem being manufactured together as a deliberate act.

Not every anthem follows the nickname. West Ham sing I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, which has nothing whatever to do with hammers or ironworks, and the derivation involves a schoolboy footballer, a soap advertisement and a headmaster. The Hammers name lives in the chants rather than the anthem.

The commercial layer arrived much later and now runs deep. Mascots are the most visible form — Gunnersaurus at Arsenal, a fox at Leicester, a terrier at Huddersfield — and each one is a nickname turned into a costume for the benefit of children who will remember it for fifty years. Club shops sell nickname merchandise separately from crest merchandise, and third kits are frequently designed around nickname imagery precisely because it gives a designer something to work with that the primary colours do not.

That commercial value is why the trade mark question comes up at all. A nickname used consistently in trade can be registered under the Trade Marks Act 1994 if it is distinctive enough, and clubs have filed on that basis to stop unlicensed merchandise. Registration does not make anyone the owner of a word in ordinary speech, and no club has ever stopped a supporter using its own nickname. It stops somebody printing it on a scarf and selling it outside the ground.

Duplicates across the pyramid

Club	Nickname	Origin	Category
West Ham United	The Hammers	Thames Ironworks shipyard	Trade
Sheffield United	The Blades	Sheffield cutlery	Trade
Luton Town	The Hatters	Straw hat manufacture	Trade
Stockport County	The Hatters	Felt hat manufacture	Trade
Northampton Town	The Cobblers	Boot and shoe trade	Trade
Walsall	The Saddlers	Leather and harness	Trade
Scunthorpe United	The Iron	Steelworks	Trade
Grimsby Town	The Mariners	Fishing fleet	Trade
Wycombe Wanderers	The Chairboys	Furniture making	Trade
Rotherham United	The Millers	Corn milling	Trade
Yeovil Town	The Glovers	Glove making	Trade
Stoke City	The Potters	Staffordshire Potteries	Trade
Crewe Alexandra	The Railwaymen	Locomotive works	Trade
Arsenal	The Gunners	Royal Arsenal, Woolwich	Trade
Newcastle United	The Magpies	Black and white stripes	Colours
Burnley	The Clarets	Shirt colour	Colours
Hull City	The Tigers	Amber and black stripes	Colours
Coventry City	The Sky Blues	1960s kit change	Colours
Nottingham Forest	The Garibaldi Reds	Garibaldi's redshirts	Colours
Queens Park Rangers	The Hoops	Banded shirt	Colours
Sheffield Wednesday	The Owls	Owlerton district	Animals
Leicester City	The Foxes	County hunting country	Animals
Norwich City	The Canaries	Canary breeding	Animals
West Bromwich Albion	The Throstles	Song thrush on the crest	Animals
Bradford City	The Bantams	Bantam cock	Animals
Millwall	The Lions	Cup run and club badge	Animals
Southampton	The Saints	St Mary's parish	Place
Plymouth Argyle	The Pilgrims	Mayflower, 1620	Place
Chesterfield	The Spireites	Crooked church spire	Place
Reading	The Royals	Royal County of Berkshire	Place
Mansfield Town	The Stags	Sherwood Forest	Place
Leeds United	The Peacocks	The Old Peacock inn	Place
Portsmouth	Pompey	Unknown	Disputed
Bolton Wanderers	The Trotters	Several competing accounts	Disputed
Charlton Athletic	The Addicks	Haddock, or Athletic corrupted	Disputed
AFC Bournemouth	The Cherries	Shirt colour, or cherry orchards	Disputed
Brentford	The Bees	A misheard chant	Disputed
Exeter City	The Grecians	Several competing accounts	Disputed
Ipswich Town	The Tractor Boys	Coined by opposing supporters	Rivals
Bristol Rovers	The Gas	Coined by Bristol City supporters	Rivals

Duplicates are more common than most supporters realise. Oldham Athletic and Wigan Athletic are both the Latics, a contraction of Athletic that arrived independently in two Lancashire towns. Oxford United, Colchester United and Cambridge United are all the U's. Newcastle and Notts County share the Magpies. Luton and Stockport share the Hatters. Blackpool and Southend have both been the Seasiders, for the same obvious reason.

Nobody arbitrates these. There is no register and no priority rule, and two clubs a hundred miles apart can carry the same nickname indefinitely without ever noticing.

The ones that no longer make sense

• 1857Sheffield FC
• 1862Notts County
• 1865Nottingham Forest
• 1888Football League

Documented foundation years for three of England's earliest clubs and for the Football League itself. Nicknames are almost always younger than the clubs that carry them.

A large share of English nicknames now describe things that are gone.

There are no hat factories in Luton and none in Stockport. The Grimsby fishing fleet is a fraction of what it was. The Royal Arsenal at Woolwich stopped manufacturing ordnance and the site is now housing, four miles and a century from the club that took its name. The Thames Ironworks shut in 1912, seventeen years after it produced West Ham United. Huntley & Palmers no longer defines Reading, which is presumably part of why the club stopped being the Biscuitmen.

This is not decline so much as fossilisation, and it is one of the more genuinely useful things football nicknames do. A visitor to Northampton who wonders why the club are the Cobblers has been handed a fact about the town's economy in 1897. The nickname is a piece of industrial history that thirty thousand people repeat every fortnight without thinking about it.

Some have decayed further than others. Charlton's Addicks is opaque even to many Charlton supporters — the leading account has it as the local pronunciation of haddock, after a fishmonger who fed the team, but the alternative derivation from a slurred Athletic has its defenders and there is no document that decides between them. Bolton's Trotters is worse: the competing accounts include a ground beside a pigsty, a Lancashire dialect word for a practical joker, and the club's wandering between grounds. Bury's Shakers is traced to an official declaring before a cup tie that his side would shake their opponents, which may be true and may be the kind of story clubs tell.

Honesty about this is more useful than confidence. Where the origin was never written down at the time, it cannot be recovered now, and a page that presents one theory as settled fact is inventing certainty that does not exist.

How to research a club nickname properly

1. 1Start with the clubRead the club's own official history and any centenary book, then treat it as a claim rather than a source.
2. 2Search the newspaper archiveThe British Newspaper Archive holds digitised local titles; search the nickname alongside the club name to find the earliest printed use.
3. 3Check the local paper by handDigitisation is patchy, so the relevant local title may only exist on microfilm at the county record office or central library.
4. 4Look at the minute booksWhere a club's committee minutes survive, they are usually held by the county record office or the club itself and will show whether the name was ever formally adopted.
5. 5Cross-check the badgeCrest changes are better documented than nicknames and often date the moment a nickname became official.
6. 6Ask the museumThe National Football Museum in Manchester and club museums hold programmes, handbooks and photographs that rarely appear online.
7. 7Record what you cannot proveNote the earliest attestation and state plainly where the trail stops.

A research sequence for English clubs. It establishes the earliest surviving printed use, which is not the same as the date the nickname was coined.

The single most important thing to understand about this research is the gap between coinage and attestation. A nickname is spoken on a terrace and in a pub for some years before a reporter writes it down, so the earliest printed appearance is a latest-possible date rather than an origin. That gap can be a decade or more, and it is why claims about the oldest nickname in English football should be treated sceptically.

Local newspapers are the primary source that matters. Match reports from the 1880s onwards used nicknames constantly, precisely because column widths were narrow and Wolverhampton Wanderers is a great deal longer than Wolves. The British Newspaper Archive has digitised a large share of the relevant titles, though coverage varies by town and by decade.

Club minute books are the second source, where they survive. They rarely record a nickname being chosen, which is itself informative — it confirms that these names came from outside the boardroom.

For anyone starting on this, the honest expectation is a partial answer. You will usually establish that a nickname was in print by a certain year, that two or three explanations circulated locally, and that the club adopted it officially at some later date when it appeared on a badge or a programme. That is a real finding. It is also, in most cases, the whole of what the evidence supports.

More on the origins of English clubs themselves sits in our guide to the oldest football clubs in England, the wider section is collected on the England hub, and longer reads are indexed on the blog.