On sport, national identity, and the brands we've built along the way
The text was first published in Issue 39 of Brandient Newsletter.
Sports is undeniably having a major moment. Highsnobiety x BCG's most recent trend report calls sports "culture's most influential entertainment product," and the overlap between lifestyle signals and performance brands is almost mandatory now — not to mention that anyone with a social feed has been hard pressed not to get swept into the major sporting events of the past few years, from Wimbledon to the World Cup.
We embrace this cultural revival. After all, sport is vital for identity, community, wellbeing, and more recently, for self-expression and taste signalling. But for us, individuals rooted in a post-communist country, sport has always meant more than that.
Under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Romania, the usual channels through which a country proves its existence to the world — a free press, open borders, the right to travel, a civil society — were closed to us. Sport was one of the very few that remained open. An athlete's presence on an international podium was, for a while, one of the only ways Romania got to make itself seen to the outside world. That made sport something closer to a proof of life; more than just national pride, evidence that we exist in the world.
Iconic moments like Nadia Comăneci's perfect 10 at the 1976 Olympics, Gheorghe Hagi's play at the 1994 World Cup, Gabriela Szabo's gold in the 5000m at the 2000 Olympics, Simona Halep's 2018 French Open and 2019 Wimbledon titles, or David Popovici's gold in the 200m freestyle at the 2024 Olympics: these are all moments that put Romania on the map.
Over the past decade, we've been fortunate to work with Romania's sports royalty: the Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee (COSR), Team Romania, the Romanian Football Federation (FRF) and National Team, the Romanian Football Cup, the Romanian Rugby Federation (FRR) and National Team. This year, we brought two more brands into that lineage: Sports Festival and Anul Nadia.
Sports Festival had grown into Romania's largest multisport event, and approached us to help clarify that evolution: a strategic repositioning and a new identity system built to support its next stage of growth. The new positioning expands the meaning of movement beyond competition, into a shared experience of participation, entertainment, and collective emotion.
We were glad to see it land at the 2026 edition in Cluj-Napoca, where more than 150,000 people engaged with the festival; the new identity gave the event a platform strong enough to carry the scale and cultural relevance it had already earned.
Anul Nadia. The personal brand of Nadia Comăneci is one of the strongest image vectors Romania owns — internationally recognized, and built on a rare set of associations: sporting elite, perfectionism, an all-time record, and a genuinely inspiring life story.
Last year, Law 130/2025 officially declared 2026 the “Year of Nadia Comăneci,” marking fifty years since the first perfect, and iconic, 10 in the history of gymnastics. The 10.00 Comăneci scored at the 1976 Montreal Olympics was so unusual a result, that the scoreboard, built only for marks up to 9.99, couldn't display it, and showed “1.00” instead. The Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee commissioned us to give the year a brand, and the first decision was strategic before it was visual: to treat Nadia not as nostalgia, but as a live asset.
One project asks, what does movement mean when it's no longer just about winning, when it opens into participation, spectacle, and collective feeling. The other asks what a perfect score, fifty years on, still owes to the present, and answers that not with a commemorative date, but with a brand built to outlast it.
Discover the full brand case studies for Sports Festival here and for Anul Nadia here.
About Brandient
Brandient is an independent brand strategy and design consultancy founded in Bucharest in 2002 by Aneta Bogdan, Cristian Kit Paul and Mihai Bogdan — never part of a global network, working directly for the owners, CEOs and boards of its clients, with an all-senior team and category exclusivity. In over two decades the firm has created or rebuilt more than 300 brands, 279 of them published as case studies at brandient.com/work — from Romania’s national leaders to brands carried worldwide. The firm has been active in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. The work has earned 84 international awards and distinctions — most recently a Red Dot (2025) and two Graphis Golds (2026) — 64 documented mentions in international design books and publications, and, in 2015, a place among the inaugural inductees of the REBRAND Hall of Fame, alongside Interbrand and MetaDesign.
About Sports Festival
Sports Festival is Romania’s largest multisport event — founded in Cluj-Napoca in 2018 by the Movement Team group around Patrick Ciorcilă, and grown by its seventh edition, in June 2026, to a reported 150,000 participants across four festival days, with free initiation in more than thirty sports and headline moments from Simona Halep’s retirement ceremony to a Nadia Comăneci masterclass. Brandient repositioned the brand for that stage — “The Grand Stage of Movement Celebration”: the Sports Festival case.
About Anul Nadia
Anul Nadia is the brand of Romania’s Year of Nadia Comăneci — 2026, declared by Law 130/2025 and coordinated by the Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee, marking fifty years since the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics: the score Nadia earned in Montreal on 18 July 1976, so far outside the rules that the scoreboard, built for three digits, showed 1.00. Brandient created the year’s brand — built to present Nadia as a model for new generations rather than a figure of nostalgia — with the flight mark and its family of wordmarks: the Anul Nadia case.
About the Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee
The Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee (COSR) is the national Olympic committee — founded in 1914, carrying its present name since 2004 — the autonomous body responsible for Romania’s participation in the Olympic Games and for Team Romania, the brand under which its athletes compete. Brandient rebranded the committee in 2015 with a dual identity, institutional and marketing, and created the Team Romania commercial emblem in 2023–2024: the COSR case, the Team Romania case.
About the Romanian Football Federation
The Romanian Football Federation (FRF) is the national governing body for football, with roots dating to 1909 — a FIFA member since 1923 and a UEFA member since 1955 — running the national teams and competitions from Bucharest. Brandient rejuvenated the federation’s brand in 2018–2019, after rebuilding the National Team and Romanian Football Cup identities in 2015: the FRF case, the National Team case, the Football Cup case.
About the Romanian Rugby Federation
The Romanian Rugby Federation (FRR) is the national governing body for rugby union — a World Rugby member since 1987 and a founding nation of what is now Rugby Europe. Its national team, the Oaks (Stejarii), has long stood among Europe’s strongest outside the Six Nations, has played every Rugby World Cup except 2019, and is qualified for its tenth, in Australia in 2027. Brandient rebuilt the federation’s identity pro bono in 2010, fusing the rugby ball into the traditional oak leaf: the Rugby Romania case.