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The stories behind sports logos and crests, from Manchester United’s Red Devil to the Olympic rings and the Tour de France cyclist.
The devil on Manchester United’s crest is borrowed from a rugby league team. Salford’s players were nicknamed the Red Devils, United took the name, and by the 1970s a pitchfork-carrying imp sat in the middle of the club’s red, gold and black shield.
Real Madrid’s crest is essentially a monogram with a crown on top, and the crown was a royal favor: King Alfonso XIII granted the club the title “Real” in 1920. Almost everything else about the badge has been adjusted over the past century, but those two elements have stayed.
FC Barcelona’s crest was not drawn by a designer. It was drawn by one of the club’s own players, Carles Comamala, who won a competition in 1910, and the badge on the shirt today is still recognizably his.
The Minnesota Timberwolves have redesigned their logo three times since joining the NBA in 1989, and every version has been a wolf. The animal stayed; the drawing got simpler, the blues got bolder, and by 2017 the fur and detail of the early years had been cut back to a clean, flat mark.
The Golden State Warriors have put a bridge at the center of their logo, which is a neat piece of symbolism for a team that changed its name from one city to a whole state. The mark is now a clean blue-and-gold badge, a long way from the franchise’s Philadelphia beginnings.
The Lakers are named after Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes, and they have played in Los Angeles, a city not known for its lakes, since 1960. The logo they adopted there, a purple-and-gold basketball with the team name across it, has outlasted the mismatch and become one of the best-known marks in American sport.
The Olympic rings were drawn in 1913 by Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron who founded the modern Games, and the design has not needed to change since. Five interlocking circles in blue, yellow, black, green and red, on white, stand for the five inhabited continents joined together.
The Tour de France started in 1903 as a publicity stunt for a newspaper, and its first “logo” was little more than lettering printed in the yellow of L’Auto. The cyclist silhouette that fans now know came much later, in the 1980s.
The Winnipeg Jets logo is less a hockey crest than an air force badge. When the NHL returned to Winnipeg in 2011, fifteen years after the original Jets left for Arizona, the new team chose a fighter jet climbing over a red maple leaf inside a circle, a design that borrows openly from the roundel of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
