How TheClub Index documents football crests
TheClub Index is not a results feed and not a mirror of Wikipedia. Our focus is visual identity: what a crest communicates, where its symbols come from, and how those symbols connect to city, region and stadium. Documentation here is editorial work, not automated scraping dressed up as research.
What a complete club page should include
- Crest meaning with club-specific symbols, colours and known redesigns — not a generic line that could fit any team.
- Club history with checkable facts: founding (or earliest documented activity), former names, mergers, and a few moments that explain why the badge looks the way it does.
- Stadium context: common name, approximate capacity when known, and whether the ground is club-owned, municipal or shared.
- Official or reliable links when they exist, so readers can verify and go deeper.
Sources we trust — and ones we treat carefully
Official club and federation sites, municipal records, dated match programmes, and serious local histories rank highest. Fan wikis and social posts can be useful clues, but we do not treat them as sole authority for founding dates or heraldic claims. When sources disagree, the page should say so rather than invent certainty.
Image rights and crest reproductions follow the site’s existing rules. We describe badges in text even when a file cannot be shown; absence of an image is never an excuse for empty prose.
What does not count as content
Sentences such as “the crest represents the identity of the city” or “the club is proud of its colours” are draft placeholders. Until real, club-specific text exists, those pages stay out of the main search-oriented set. The same rule applies to duplicated blurbs pasted across an entire league.
Editorial workflow in brief
Many entries begin as structured templates (name, location, competition tier). Editors then replace stubs with sourced paragraphs, fix spellings, and align stadium fields. Priority often goes to clubs that already attract visits, historic Big clubs with thin text, and pages that sit one edit away from being genuinely useful.
How to contribute
Use the correction suggestion on a club page, or write through the contact channels listed on the site. Prefer concrete diffs (“capacity is X according to the municipal site, updated March 2025”) over vague complaints. We especially welcome local-language sources from Portugal, Brazil and other football countries represented in the catalogue.
Related reading: our posts on which club pages are indexable and from template to sourced page.