Club Brugge’s new logo meets with opposition

Belgian football club, Club Brugge, has filed a new trademark logo consisting of the little crown that appears on several Club Brugge logos and a ball bearing a close resemblance to a basketball.

The application for this logo covers a wide range of classes, including cosmetics, bags and events organisation. It is not yet entirely clear whether this will become the new club logo, it could just be intended for use as an additional logo on, for example, merchandising.

In the meantime, the logo encounters a setback because it has met with an opposition. The letters FCB immediately bring FC Barcelona to mind, but this is not who filed the opposition.

The American company, FCB Worldwide, Inc., owns the European trademark FCB and is active in the advertising sector. This company filed the opposition against Club Brugge's logo. The particular problem seems to be the letters FCB in the logo, filed for services in class 35.

The downside about letter trademarks (trademarks consisting of a few letters, which usually form an abbreviation) is that they crop up quite frequently in the trademark register. Even if two letter trademarks refer to totally different names (in this case, probably Football Club Brugge and Foote, Cone & Belding), the abbreviations are still the same. This means that abbreviations frequently come up against problems.