Petersen 18 flag

Via Sportsfonts:

This is how I like to see our (free) Libero typeface! ❤️🤍 #Petersen

Nils Petersen is not your average football player. Born in Wernigerode (type trivia: like Paul Renner, designer of Futura) in 1988, he started his professional career at Carl Zeiss Jena. For the past eight and a half years, though, Petersen played for SC Freiburg. There he attained a legendary status, not only because he eventually became the club’s all-time top scorer, but also for his loyalty: he stayed with the underdog from Germany’s far southwest after being relegated in 2015, despite other lucrative offers, and despite being considered for the national team at the time.

In his league debut for Freiburg, Petersen came on as a substitute for the second half, and scored a hat-trick, ultimately helping his team turning a 0–1 deficit into a 4–1 victory. This set the path for the future: with 34 goals as a substitute, he leads this particular statistic by a huge margin. The super-sub announced his retirement from professional football at the end of the 2022–23 Bundesliga season. After scoring his final home game on 19 May 2023 – coming on as a substitute, of course – fans and fellow team members bid him an emotional farewell. This included a giant flag featuring Petersen’s squad number in Libero. See it in motion in this video clip.

Christoph Koeberlin’s numerals-only font is an homage to classic squad numbers as seen on football jerseys from the 1980s and early 1990s. It’s available from Sportsfonts under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.