The creativity behind our UEFA final programmes

PUBLICATIONS
UEFA
EDITORIAL
Go behind the scenes with our design and editorial teams to learn about the creativity injected into UEFA’s match day final programmes

Here at TwelfthMan we’ve been producing UEFA’s official club final programmes for the past ten years, taking the Champions League, Women’s Champions League, Europa League and now Conference League programmes all the way from initial concepts through to print and distribution.

 

Every new season brings a fun creative challenge for our publications design and editorial teams, to bring original ideas and new creative concepts to the programmes and keep them feeling unique and fresh year-on-year. Each competition also has its own unique brand, which isn’t necessarily designed for use in a publication, giving us an opportunity to really make the brand our own and shine in a printed context.

 

Across all four 2024/25 club competition programmes, our publications designers developed concepts with plenty of creative flourishes, while our editorial team wrote and commissioned articles to bring the individual flavour of each competition to life.

 

Take a look at some of the pages from this year’s final programmes, and hear about the ideas behind them, below.

No items found.

Champions League

 

The brand identity for this year’s Champions League final was themed around the ‘urban playground’ vibe of Munich and the street art displayed across the city. For the roll of honour pages in the 2025 programme, which list all previous winners of the competition, we decided to create a wall of football fan stickers. We asked designers across the TwelfthMan studio to help, producing a variety of stickers for each time with different creative styles, resulting in a striking spread that built on the aesthetic of the final.

 

Inside the programme, we decided to use elements of the visual language of the final branding to create an expressive hand-rendered effect, evoking the street art inspiration of the branding. This personal touch extended to the articles in the programme too, with journalist and author Graham Hunter writing a powerful piece reflecting on his memories of the illustrious competition, from childhood to the present day.

Women’s Champions League

 

Similarly to our approach for the men’s Champions League final programme, we took inspiration from the city of Lisbon for key elements of this publication. We used a pattern based on the tiles that adorn the city’s walls for the programme’s cover, creating a striking abstract design that fit neatly with the names and logos of the finalists.

 

For the team section of the programme, we created distinctive hand-drawn opening pages for Arsenal and Barcelona, as a hint to the creative approach fans take to the women’s game. Our writing in the programme also celebrated this aspect of the sport, with Lizzie Coan interviewing a number of fans about what makes the women’s game so special and the creative ways they support their beloved teams.

Europa League

 

The roll of honour section in the Europa League programme also offered up a great opportunity for our designers to put their own creative stamp on the programme. We created a hand-rendered stitching effect for each winner’s badge on a texture suggestive of a shirt, to create a distinctive page celebrating the winners.

 

We also utilised the patterns within the Europa League brand in a new, expressive way on the programme’s cover, creating a unique graphic response which celebrated elements of Bilbao.

Conference League

 

The Conference League is still a young competition, and gives an opportunity for smaller teams to make their mark on the European stage. This year, it also gave eventual winners Chelsea a chance to find their rhythm with a new set of young players. We commissioned former player and current pundit Pat Nevin to write a piece for the programme about this new Chelsea generation, using his time at Chelsea to reflect on what the team had done well this season.

 

On the design side, we used the energy wave and dynamic grid elements of the Conference League brand to inject a sense of energy into the design, and created holding shapes layered with cutout images on the team openers to create a visually rich encapsulation of the tournament.

Previous
No previous post

GET IN TOUCH

Let’s work together