How Nomad named and branded six rugby sevens clubs with no home city

Ultimate Sevens is a rugby sevens league – backed by BIA Sports Group, the owners of Premier League football club Sunderland – whose first season took place in Cardiff, Biarritz and London in September 2026. It needed six club identities for that season, which were all created by London-based design studio Nomad. “We had six weeks to do it – to name them, the themes, and design them, and get them trademarked,” explains Co-founder & Executive Creative Director Stu Watson. None of the six clubs has a home city, a stadium or generations of supporters behind it. “In sport, teams usually get their identity from their city,” explains Associate Strategy Director Isabel Maguire. “When franchises move, they often lean on something more portable – whether it’s St. Louis or Los Angeles – the Rams can move house without losing their identity. But that didn’t work for us. These clubs had to create an immediate sense of place and distinct personality while still belonging to one Ultimate Sevens world.” Instead of a city, each club represents one of six broad territories, which Nomad established with the aim of building “an international fandom from day one,” as Partner & Creative Director Callum York puts it. The clubs are Albion Athletic for England, Atlantic Novas for North America, Clan Taran for Ireland, Scotland and Wales, Foudre Bleue for France, Pacific Current for Oceania and the Pacific Islands, and Sol Feroz for Spain and Latin America. The studio also set a shared naming structure: a geographic prefix, a central name that captures the club’s character or playing style and a ‘Sevens Club’ suffix. “But for tone, we looked beyond rugby and football to more niche sport communities like skate collective the Palace Wayward Boys Choir – names that feel less like franchises and more like something you’d actually want to belong to,” Maguire notes. For the marks, Nomad avoided the clichés of sports club branding. “The biggest one was the reliance on literal mascots and animals. Rugby has an enormous visual history built around lions, tigers, bears, birds and other creatures,” details Design Director George Edwards. “There is a temptation with sports branding to manufacture history through shields, crests, ornamental typography and pseudo-traditional devices. Ultimate Sevens didn’t have that history. And we didn’t need to pretend that it did.” Each club has an interlocking monogram. “They give us the best of both worlds – they feel like authentic sports crests, but with modern streetwear appeal,” Edwards tells us. “Our thinking was creating something that looks amazing on a baseball cap and that probably sounds a bit frivolous, but that’s how you get fandom,” Watson adds. “In terms of shared features across all six logos, they were all drawn from the same baseline, but each carries its own regional character,” Edwards notes. “We developed logo animation behaviours across the clubs so that each monogram carries its own movement style while operating in sync, moving to the exact same tempo and cadence.” “The verbal identity is what helped turn six visual identities into six actual clubs,” explains Strategist Millie Riley. “Each has its own manifesto and tagline, built around its character and playing attitude.” The taglines include Albion Athletic’s ‘Built for Glory,’ Atlantic Novas’ ‘Bright. Bold. Blazing,’ Clan Taran’s ‘Feel The Thunder,’ Foudre Bleue’s ‘Light It Up’ and Pacific Current’s ‘See Us Rise.’ “Foudre Bleue is all French flair, attacking ambition and unpredictability,” Riley tells us. “Pacific Current is about collective energy and momentum building beneath the surface. ‘See Us Rise’ gives that shared power a voice.” Each club’s men’s and women’s teams share its monogram and its kit, which Reebok produced. Replica shirts and baseball caps are on sale, and a limited-edition collection of Club Vector Jackets has been announced. “The end result is that the identities aren’t simply logos placed on a Reebok shirt,” York concludes. “They become part of the overall kit language.” Nomad Ultimate Sevens