Using the new UEFA Nations League logo with kit colours in place of small flags like usual has led to the result that the Danish football team is represented by a symbol conspicuously similar to the flag of Greenland.
For the first Nations League football tournament of 2018-2019, with 55 European countries competing for a newly designed trophy, UEFA made the choice not to use national flags to represent national teams in TV graphics when broadcasting matches.
Instead, bicolour versions of the new Nations League logo are used: black and white for Germany, orange and white for the Netherlands, green and white for Ireland, and so on. These are not the national colours of the countries in question, but rather the colours of the kit worn by their national football teams.
The new UEFA Nations League logo is designed by a Portuguese company, Y&R Branding, of Lisbon. Y&R Branding, on its website, describes the logo as “a system of modules based on geometrical figures that illustrate promotion (upward triangle), draw (circle) and relegation (downward triangle)”.
Unintentionally, this all leads to the fact that the Danish team, playing in the colors of the national flag of Denmark, is now represented by a symbol closely resembling the flag of Greenland: divided horizontally by white and red, a disk in the middle with colours counterchanged.
It is unfortunate that no-one at Y&R Branding or UEFA noticed that the module would look remarkably like the Greenlandic flag when utilizing the colours red and white. For anyone familiar with the design of Greenland’s iconic Erfalasorput, UEFA Nations League tv graphics look like someone tried to colour the Greenlandic flag and failed in 55 different ways.