The Weird and Wild World of Soccer Mascots | OneFootball

While the zany and enthusiastic sports mascot might generally be associated with American sports, there are plenty of them littered throughout international football. We dive into some of the wildest, exploring their backstories and biggest moments on the pitch. 

Who doesn’t love a good sports mascot? There’s nothing quite like the mix of joy and awkwardness that comes with hugging a grown adult in a smelly dog costume.

But a mascot is more than an anthropomorphic animal suit sewn together with carpet remnants into which teams stick the newest interns. They’re a critical and memorable component of the matchday experience for kids and adults alike. Ignore them at your peril; no one is immune to their cartoonish charm.

They’ll dance the YMCA without fear of being judged. They’ll yuk it up with star players, they’ll merrily prank the opposing team, and they’ll tumble to the grass at the drop of a hat if it means eliciting a chuckle from the home fans. When the going gets tough and the visiting team notches a goal, the mascot will still have that goofy smile plastered to its face, a metaphorical reminder for the languishing home faithful that this too shall pass.

While we tend to associate the bizarre world of mascots to American sports leagues, international soccer more than holds its own when it comes to terrifying and enchanting match-goers of all ages with elaborate and, frankly, sometimes unbelievable costumes. Below, we’ll take a look into some of the most unhinged (least hinged?) examples from around the globe, and dive into their mysterious origins.

Partick Thistle FC: Kingsley

A Glasgow club living eternally in the shadows of Celtic and Rangers, Partick Thistle did the middle-child thing and flailed around for attention when they enlisted award-winning artist David Shrigley to design a, let’s say, unconventional new mascot for the club.

Kingsley is a yellow abomination: its top half a bright starburst of a sun with hollow, dead-eyes, Tyrion Lannister nose (post Battle of the Blackwater), buck teeth, and Frida Kahlo unibrow. The mascot’s bottom half is as lazy and it is unsettling, amounting to a set of urine-colored pajamas that extend down to the grass.

We can certainly appreciate, however, that Kingsley’s design was at the behest of Kingsford Capital Management, a California-based hedge fund that sponsors Partick Thistle FC. Was Shrigley making a tongue-in-cheek statement about the involvement of private equity in football when he put pen to paper and designed this monstrosity? We’ll never know.

But Shrigley contends that Kingsley is a representation of “the angst of being a football fan.” Maybe the reason he’s so unsettling is that we can all see ourselves, just a little bit, in that haunting mug?

Arsenal: Gunnersaurus Rex

Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images

Did you ever ask yourself why Toronto, Canada, a city not particularly known for paleontological revelation, has a professional basketball franchise called “The Raptors?”

If you’re not from the 1900s like I am, it’s easy to forget that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was the only thing most of us could think of for a period of about three years. We all got caught up in dinosaur fever…it was the ’90s!

In 1993, Arsenal FC held a competition to design their new mascot, and opened it up to members of their youth fan club, known as the “Junior Gunners.” Eleven-year-old Peter Lovell, presumably having just watched dinosaurs run rampant on Isla Nublar, decided that his favorite club must be represented by a large, friendly dinosaur wearing a full Arsenal kit.

Lovell and another Junior Gunner, Andrew Wainwright, both submitted entries for “Gunnersaurus Rex,” so the club leaned into the serendipity and announced both boys as winners. Gunnersaurus made his debut at Arsenal’s Highbury Stadium in August 1994, and has been delighting fans ever since. He always sports the latest Arsenal home shirt, made for him custom by a local costume shop, replete with his personal number, 99.

The green dinosaur we all know and love had a moment in the recent zeitgeist for a less-than-savory reason. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jerry Quy, having portrayed Gunnersaurus since his inception in 1994, was temporarily let go of the club for budgetary reasons. This led to massive fan outcry, and Arsenal star Mesut Ozil publicly offered to pay Gunnersaurus’s salary until such time as normal operations resumed.

Borussia Monchengladbach: Junter the Foal

German boomerang club Borussia Mönchengladbach made a splash back in the 1960s with a young squad full of eager, energetic warriors. Journalist Wilhelm August Hurtmanns, quite taken with their swashbuckling style of play, nicknamed them “The Young Foals,” as a nod to their lightning quick movement around the pitch. The nickname stuck, and in 1998, the club honored its storied past by unveiling Junter the Foal, named after club legend Gunter Netzer, who played in nearly 300 games for the North Rhine-Westphalian outfit, notching 108 goals.

Junter hypes the crowd up pre-match, has a column in the club’s magazine, and is a frequent fixture at local charitable events. The original Junter was a nightmarish 7-foot-tall jet black horse with a tuft of white hair, unsettlingly red lips, and the sort of vacant stare you’d expect to see on your Vietnam veteran uncle after a few drinks. In 2006, Junter was redesigned to make him look more cartoonish and inviting, and presumably to give fewer children night terrors.

Wigan Athletic: Crusty the Pie

Photo by James Fearn/Getty Images

English clubs not yet having learned to stop letting children choose their mascots, Wigan Athletic opened their search to the local “Premier League Primary Stars” youth program so the kiddos there could send in their most deranged proposals.

The winning bid came from Cayden, 8, and Neve, 9, who stated that the design took them between 30 minutes to an hour, and that “We designed Crusty like this because everyone in Wigan loves pies!”

The giant walking foodstuff is, however, a charming nod to local history. Wigan is an industrial town sitting halfway between Manchester and Liverpool in the north of England. Residents of the town have long been known as “pie-eaters,” dating back to a 1926 coal miners’ strike, during which picketing workers were effectively starved back to work in the mine, ergo eating a helping of “humble pie.”

Crusty wears the number 8, and engages in all the usual mascot antics. During an FA Cup fixture in February of 2026 between Wigan Athletic and Arsenal, Crusty fell in dramatic fashion to Gunnersaurus in halftime penalty shootout.

Perth Glory: George the Glory Gorilla

Perth Glory FC, one of the eight founding teams of the Australian A-League, have employed George the Glory Gorilla as their mascot since 2010. A grinning, muscular primate of orange and purple, George rocks disquieting washboard abs and a sinister gaze. The cheeky George might be more interesting, however, based on the man inside the costume.

Simon Lumbus is a high school teacher and amateur gymnast from Hamersley, Australia. If there’s one thing you ought to know about Simon, it’s that he really loves being a mascot. The father of three also portrays the mascot for rival Australian Football League (Australian Rules) clubs West Coast Eagles and the Freemantle Football Club Dockers. For West Coast, he dons a surly, grimacing eagle costume and goes by the moniker Rick “The Rock,” while for Freemantle he dresses as a pale humanoid cartoon with a shock of yellow hair who calls himself Johnny “The Doc” Docker.

When the teams play one another, he always dresses as the eagle, but in public, Lumbus will only ever admit that he portrays the mascot of whichever team’s fans he happens to be speaking to. There’s no word on how this sort of mascot split personality affects Lumbus’s mental health, but I suppose that when you love strapping on comically large cartoon heads as much as this guy does, you find every possible opportunity to do it.

West Bromwich Albion: Boiler Man

Photo by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

The Midlands club, currently plying their trade in the EFL Championship, have a pair of mascots. The more traditional one, Baggie Bird, much like Junter the Foal, used to be scarier and resemble more a sleep paralysis demon than a soccer mascot, but his recent update makes a kindly, approachable fellow. Baggie is a thrush, which I always believed was only a weird mouth disease, but it turns out that it’s also the little bird that West Brom sport on their team badge.

But when West Brom signed a sponsorship deal with local company Ideal Boilers in 2018, the club unveiled a new hero to delight children and adults alike: Boiler Man.

Boiler Man, or, if you’re on personal terms, Colin the Combi, is a walking furnace. His only face is a small digital screen near his midriff, but he gamely parades around The Hawthorns Stadium on matchdays, side by side with Baggie, the straight-man/foil pair representing a true mascot Abbott and Costello.

Fans were quick to embrace the walking heating implement, and Boiler Man took social media by storm. He’s no traditional sports mascot, after all. He’s got a bevy of heating-themed celebrations, from a temperature gauge that rises during critical moments of the match to releasing steam from his head to signal a goal.

The West Brom social media team has also leapt at the chance to incorporate Boiler man into their content. Both he and Baggie are fixtures at community events, visit sick kids at the hospital, and have even cut the ribbon at local business-openings.

There’s an official Boiler Man YouTube channel, which at the time of this writing only had 44 subscribers, so let’s beef up those numbers. Boiler Man can be seen undergoing training sessions with the West Brom players, running on a treadmill, and being spun around into a dizzy haze before blasting a penalty kick wide.

Some fans even took to producing their own unofficial Boiler Man plush toys and selling them on various online retailers. It’s Boiler Man’s world, and the rest of us are just living in it.

Portland Timbers: Timber Joey

Photo by Alika Jenner/Getty Images

The Timbers are perhaps one of the proudest and deepest-rooted (no pun intended) soccer clubs in the United States. Dating back officially to 2009, the club carries on the legacy of the original Portland Timbers franchise that competed in the NASL from 1975 to 1982.

Given that Portland, Oregon tends to, let’s say, march to the beat of its own drum, it only makes sense that the Timbers would eschew the traditional mascot formula in favor of something more artisanal.

Meet Timber Joey! Now, we can imagine what a giant cartoon lumberjack would look like, and we all agree that it would look simultaneously horrifying and enchanting. But instead of sticking someone in an inflatable suit to snap pictures with rugrats, the Timbers decided to employ a real, honest-to-goodness lumberjack to chainsaw shit in the middle of matches.

If you’ve seen any of the southernmost Cascadia club recently, you’ll be well aware that upon notching a goal, Timber Joey springs into action. The burly mascot, government name Joseph Webber, leaps atop a metal platform, a freshly cut log of Douglas Fir draped with countless scarves waiting patiently to be sliced by Joey’s Makita 7900p chainsaw. Just a few sweet moments later, a bulky cut of wood falls with a thud, and Joey lifts it, presenting to the crowd as they thunder with applause. The two-foot wide “log slabs” are paraded through the stands and gifted to their respective Timbers goal scorers after the games have concluded. The revving of the chainsaw and the sawdust flying at Providence Park make for memorable, if unorthodox, goal celebrations, unique among all world’s top-tier soccer stadiums.

The tradition harkens back to the NASL days, when a Timbers diehard named Jim Serill begged the front office to be allowed to bring a chainsaw to matches. Given that at the time the club was owned by a lumber company, they figured it would be good advertising, and allowed Jim to hack slices off a wooden beam whenever a goal was scored. Timber Jim retired in 2008, but as the club made the leap to Major League Soccer, Joey was selected as successor. Joey is a real outdoorsman and lumberjack, having competed in state forestry and timber competitions since his youth. But don’t worry: he takes his safety very seriously. Timber Joey wears a regulation hardhat, kevlar-lined trousers, and protective eyewear to make sure his log slicing doesn’t bring any adverse consequences.