I grew up supporting the Lions – I hate that my real Aston Villa nickname has fallen out of use

What nickname do you use for Aston Villa? It sounds like a trivial question but a club’s nickname plays into its identity and branding in ways that get under the skin of supporters. It’s simpler at some clubs than others.

Villa beat Manchester City in the Premier League yesterday. They are, depending on who you listen to, the Cityzens.

You couldn’t pay me to use a nickname like that. I wouldn’t say it. I wouldn’t wear it. I wouldn’t use it as a second mention in an article. It’s awful.

Seeing ‘Cityzens’ stretching across the backs of their warm-up tops at Villa Park on Sunday gave me a moment of reflection about Villa’s nickname – or, to put it more accurately, about Villa’s nicknames.

Ours is a more fluid debate than most. With 151 years of history behind us and a name that’s already unique in the professional game, the sands of informal monikering have shifted back and forth over the years.

The use of nicknames is a nebulous art at the best of times. Some clubs have nicknames that supporters adopt wholeheartedly, others barely have one at all. They pop up in the media frequently but sometimes betray a lack of authenticity.

Our heroes are Villans – or are they?

Liverpool are the Reds. If you read an article in a newspaper that calls them the Reds a couple of times, you wouldn’t bat an eyelid. It’s not the same for Villa. It’s less refined and uniform to such an extent that frequent use of ‘the Villans’ could come across as a little bit weird in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

I must confess to not loving the Villans as a nickname. It occupies a strange historical context in the sense that it feels to some supporters of my vintage to be a modern creation when in fact it has much deeper roots.

Before Sunday’s match I was talking to a neutral football journalist and happened to mention my four-letter observation about the Cityzens – and its occasional stylisation as CityZens – and, while he agreed, he threw Villans back at me.

I don’t think it was an unfair point. Rightly or wrongly our club’s nickname does have that slight feel about it. I’d never thought about it in such black and white terms but I realised in that moment that Villans has never been my nickname for the club at all.

Unashamedly part of the pride

It’s certainly true that a majority of Villa supporters consider Villans to be the right and proper nickname for the club. It’s not just different; it’s specific. It’s ours and that matters, so it’s counter-intuitive that, to me, Aston Villa are the Lions.

I don’t know if growing up in the 1990s explains that but I’d say the Lions is Villa’s nickname over the Villans all day, every day. It says more about what the club should be. Villa adopt the iconography of the Lions without really using the word and it seems to have fallen out of use.

There’s a big dollop of nostalgia flavouring my preference.

Villa aren’t the Lions to me because of how we’re referenced in the media or because it’s listed on Wikipedia, but because of years of ‘Come on you Lions!’ ringing around the previous incarnation of Villa Park every time Ron Atkinson and Brian Little’s teams won a corner. There’s not a Villans equivalent.

It was a sort of connective cultural tissue between my Villa and the recent past. It felt significant to me in a way the Villans never has.

What we really are…

There’s a reason the Villa haven’t alighted on a fixed and universally agreed nickname: we’re the Villa.

It’s not clever or illustrative but it’s so commonly used and so completely ours that there doesn’t really need to be another nickname on top of it. Nobody else is the Villa. Nobody can be.

It doesn’t matter to me what’s official. What counts is what we as supporters say to each other. I’d never refer to the Villans in conversation but then I’d never mention the Lions either.

You’ll never read a news story about Liverpool or Manchester United that doesn’t include ‘Reds’ or ‘Red Devils’ and yet Villans always grates in that context.

We’re the Villa. Perhaps that in itself is the most important thing but I must admit that having the official Lions nickname lurking in the background always meant more to me than Villans ever did.

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