Forest Green Rovers are certainly a League Two side with ambitions – ambitions that have served to rub a lot of rival fans up the wrong way on their rise from the non-leagues over the past couple of years.
For the uninitiated, Rovers are an entirely vegan football club and, as of Monday, the world’s first UN-certified carbon neutral football club too.
At the behest of chairman Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity, they play on an organic pitch and have a stadium that is designed to both collect rainwater and generate its own source of green energy via a solar panel array on the roof.
It’s all thoroughly commendable stuff, though it doesn’t come without that slight… well, smugness that the majority of vegans seem to naturally bio-emanate.
That’s why, when you see the new above-badge star system Rovers are implementing on their new 2018/19 kits, it’s difficult not to roll your eyeballs into the very deepest recesses of your cranial cavity.
So what happens if Rovers get promoted to League One, fill in one of their stars and then go straight back down again? Does it go back to grey? Is this a rolling thing? Will stars be added/taken away depending on performances?
It’s all a bit naff – though, in mitigation, the club have vowed that their new strips will buck at least one risible modern trend…
Unlike many clubs, the Forest Green Rovers kits will be worn for two seasons making them greener for the planet and lighter on the wallet for fans, retailing at the same price as last season’s kit.
Fair dos.
Now we don’t know whether to chuckle wryly or offer a polite ripple of golf applause, or both.