Global Fútbol

This season, Burgos CF have a new and particularly loyal fan, one who has taken charge of leading the rest of the crowd in cheering the team during all of Los Blanquinegros’ matches at the Estadio Municipal de El Plantío. This is Morciyeti, the new mascot of the team, who has joined the Burgos CF family to help promote the club’s values and identity in a friendly and positive way.

There were a few options the club could have opted for with the new mascot, and all of them were related in some way to the cold, as Burgos is an area known for its adverse climate. Even after deciding to select a mascot related to the cold, the club wanted to go beyond what was expected. As Burgos CF’s communication and marketing department explained: “We had a penguin in mind. Since it’s black and white, it fitted perfectly with the idea and with our image, but we wanted to be a bit more original. In the end, a penguin would be the kind of thing everyone would expect, what anyone would have done.”

To stand out, they ultimately went for the Yeti, which is often called the Abominable Snowman and which also fits well since Burgos and its citizens have experienced significant snowfalls over the years. The club pointed out that there were many glaciers in the area around Burgos millions of years ago, so “we waited until winter to bring our Yeti out of the cave”, with the aim of this mascot becoming “a part of the support, helping us combat the low temperatures with his warmth”.

For Burgos CF, keeping close ties with and interacting with the fans is very important. With this in mind, the club wanted the supporters to be the ones to choose the name of the new mascot. Explaining how this selection process went, the club’s communication and marketing department said: “Both on social media and in the street, there was a buzz about Morciyeti. We launched a poll with four options on social media and included Morciyeti among them. That name won by a landslide (over Yeti, Yeyito and Buryeti).”

With this, two things Burgos is known well for have come together to give life to Morceyeti, namely the cold and the city’s signature dish of black pudding, which is called morcilla in Spanish. The club added: “The union between the character and black pudding, the gastronomic symbol of our region, is a promotion in itself, has real meaning and sounds wonderful just saying it.”

At Burgos CF, they have understood from the beginning that the mascot can do a good job of representing the club and this is why Morciyeti has taken part in various events beyond the matchdays, though it’s at the stadium where the impact was most immediately felt. The club stated: “The way our fans cheer the team on at El Plantío has turned Burgos CF into a global phenomenon. More and more people are coming, so more and more children are coming.  We felt we needed a mascot for multiple reasons, all of them essential and related to the magical and powerful atmosphere that we have generated here at Burgos CF.”

Morciyeti has already been present at other club events, such as a visit to the Colegio SAFA Burgos, a local school, for the start of the holiday season, or another appearance at a social event for the Movember movement that was held by the official club shop. On how the club plan to make the most of the new networking possibilities the mascot provides, they said: “Connecting with kids was one of our priorities. Then, once the football match finishes, and the passion of the stadium dies down, there are other equally important targets. For example, schools, which are the basis of education for the next generations, are windows that we are trying to tap into. There are also signing events with sponsors or social events, where we come into direct contact with citizens and fans.”

From the very beginning, this initiative has been a great success and the club pointed out that proof of this is the fact that “LaLiga itself has been here filming and the content they have created for social media has worked really well, so this, by itself, generates an economic return”.

As for the more traditional business channels, the creation of the mascot has also led to further commercial interest through the agreement reached with the Camino de la Plata Shopping Centre. However, the priority for Los Blanquinegros is for “Morciyeti to connect with the fans and to find a place in the little black and white hearts of all our supporters”. From there, they’ll then look for more advanced adventures for the new mascot.