After the proposed new design - set to mark the club's centenary by being introduced at the start of next season - had garnered more than 50,000 online signatures of protest within hours of being released yesterday, the club's managing director Angus Kinnear told BBC Radio Leeds: "We've made a pig's arse of this, and now we need to start all over again and listen properly to what the fans want."

Oh sorry, no. What he said was this: "We need to reopen the consultation process.

"Because the direction is so distinctive and breaks with a lot of conventions, that consultation process hasn't gone deep enough."

Err, what?

So it is just a matter of going deeper with that old consultation process until the new design meets with deserved approval, is it? Really?

From the way Leeds supporters have reacted, it looks as if Kinnear and his fellow consulters could go all the way through the club's fanbase and will still get the same answer.

Supporters' descriptions of the badge ranged from "awful" to "horrendous" to "shocking".

Leeds defender Pontus Jansson admitted he was in a "state of shock".

Ian Harte, the Irish international defender who made 288 appearances for the club over nine years, and featured in the unveiling video, said he was "not a fan".

You can't help thinking this should have rung some alarm bells among the Elland Road marketing wallahs…

One of their concerns, apparently, was that the script of LUFC which has adorned the club badge from 1998 - and which was on the shirts in the club's early 1970s pomp - was confusing.

Not to Leeds fans it wasn't.

The other change that has been criticised is there is no symbol on it. Leeds fans, like so many other football and indeed non-football folk, like a symbol, whether it be the White Rose of Yorkshire or the city's owl.

To be fair, there was neither script nor symbol on the 1970s design brought in by manager Don Revie in 1973, at the instigation of self-styled marketing genius Paul Trevillion, who also introduced themed sock garters and a mercifully short-lived pre-match high kicking routine for the players.

The new crest was a stylised, simplified, rounded form of the letters L and U, and was widely compared to a smiley badge. Some loved it, some loathed it, but it lasted into the 1980s.

It is true that people tend not to like change; it is true also that everything has to change eventually.

After all, even Elland Road itself was originally known as the Old Peacock Ground. And in 1962 Revie famously jettisoned the blue and yellow colours worn by the legendary John Charles et al and replaced them with an all-white tribute to Real Madrid. Aspirational was not in it. There must have been a fair few grumbles among the fans at that - although of course no online petitions to reflect the mood…

This is not a new tale. You meddle with the fabric of football clubs at your peril, as badges, crests, colours and mottos are part of the heart of a true fan. They are almost like articles of faith in a sporting world that is changing shape at bewildering pace.

For instance, Everton FC sent its fans into a fury five years ago when it scrapped the motto Nil Satis Nisi Optimum - "nothing but the best is good enough" - that had adorned the club badge for 75 years.

The club apologised after 22,000 fans signed an online petition condemning the "awful" 2013-2014 badge. The motto was restored…

But this latest badge controversy involves something a bit different from the usual to-and-fro over tradition.

Judging from many of the reactions of Leeds fans online, one of the main objections to the proposed new design is that it has incorporated, in the worst sense of that word, the unofficial "Leeds salute" with which true fans have recognised each other for 30-odd years.

Before he departed the club, the unlamented former owner, Massimo Cellino, was pictured on Leeds' social media making the same informal supporters' salute. 

It went down about as well as Robert Maxwell's Oxford United bobble hat back in the day when he dreamed of merging the club with Reading into a dream franchise - Thames Valley Royals!

This latest exercise shares some of the same leaden quality of such manoeuvres. It is not respecting the fans' unofficial tradition, so much as appropriating it. 

Doubtless the marketing men had visions of a packed stadium full of obediently breast-beating fans. To the true fans, this would surely be as irksome as - to pluck an image from the air - Dad trying to be cool by getting down with the kids. 

At which point the kids cringe and inwardly swear to move on to something Dad doesn't know and can't ruin…

Expect an Owl. A Peacock. A Rose. A Script. Anything but this.