Manchester United and Man City facing calls to change badge with 'slavery links'

Manchester United and City are facing calls to amend their badges amid suggestions that the boats on their motifs are linked to slavery.

Anti-discrimination campaigners have called for interrogation into potential links between the logos and the city benefiting from the trade. Lemn Sissay, the Manchester poet,  said "we are all looking closer" and has suggested his city "needs to know it" if the ships represent slavery.

Ged Grebby, chief executive of Show Racism the Red Card, added that he "welcomed" a debate around what the symbols on the shirts represent.

Suggestions that the logo should be removed were raised in an article in the Guardian. “As someone from the diaspora of Jamaica, I have been on a mission to hopefully force the change and removal of slave ships featured on both Manchester City and Manchester United’s club logos, plus the City of Manchester council,” a reader letter to the newspaper said.

United and City declined to comment in response, although a source close to the clubs told Telegraph Sport there are no plans to review logos for either teams.

While inner-land city does not share the same direct associations with the slave trade as Liverpool or Bristol, Manchester was a leading beneficiary of merchants and became known as "Cottonopolis" in the 1800s.

Grebby stopped short of urging City and United to rethink their badges, but he welcomed "conversations around contentious aspects of British history".

"It is already widely documented that the country profited from the Atlantic slave trade," the leading campaigner against racism in football added. "The wealth and success of our cities and industries has proven links, symbols of which can be seen throughout the UK. The key opportunity for anti-racism within education is to talk about colonialism, the long-term legacy of slavery and how this manifests today. This is why Show Racism the Red card calls for decolonisation of the curriculum."

An article in the Guardian questioned whether boats "shame" the Premier League giants. “If slavery is part of what made Manchester great, then Manchester needs to know it and name it, from the ships on the football shirts to the cotton mills of the Industrial Revolution," Sissay told the newspaper in response. "We are all looking closer and the day will come. The question for those dragging their feet is this: are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution?”

A boat is the main element of City's badge whilst United's is a smaller image above the iconic Red Devil. Ships are a widely-used emblem in the city, featuring on the Technical school, which is part of the University of Manchester, the Corn Exchange and various hotels.

In more recent years, a bee symbol has been adopted in the city as an alternative emblem of the city proud industrial history.

After the Arena bombing, Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, had a bee tattoo inked on his inner arm. The debate around the badges comes three years after the summer of the Black Lives Matter movement which led to activists in Bristol pulling down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston.

However, Luthfur Rahman, Manchester city council’s deputy leader, urged against the "eradication" of his own city's past. He said: “Manchester’s past is a complex mix of stories, lives and voices, and we’re in the middle of a long-term project that began in 2020 to highlight and reflect on aspects of the city’s past, including the city’s black history and connections to the slave trade. Working alongside Manchester Histories, our universities and other partners, including local communities, our focus is on education and learning, rather than eradication of the city’s past.”