When looking at the Super Bowl logo, one can’t help but think of the phrase “Corporate culture,” which is one of the worst business buzzwords you’ll ever hear.
It’s right up there with “paradigm shift,” “synergy,” “core competencies” and “best practices” in the corporatespeak pantheon of meaningless gobbledy gook.
That’s because corporate culture often prioritizes homogeneity and predictability above all else, and the National Football League is more than happy to conform.
The NFL is a hyper-protected brand, on levels both great and small that would blow your mind. The NFL brand is protected with the ferocity of a mafia hit man.
And that’s how we got an awful devolution and regression of the official Super Bowl logo. But at least it has made a slight recovery now.
The graphic in this tweet below explains it perfectly:
Take a look at the Super Bowl logo history above.
Never forget when Super Bowl logos meant something pic.twitter.com/as4IeLNxC6
— Art Vandelay (@KingFavre) February 3, 2025
Notice how from I-XIL you had a uniqueness to the design; originality flowed. There were some hits and misses of course. Obviously, some Super Bowl logo s were certainly much better than others.
Sometimes the Super Bowl logo was basic and blah, other times it got more daring and creative. With many of these logos, you can actually tell where the game was. What a novel concept!
You can see the iconic imagery and well-known design elements (even specific fonts) that evoke specific cities: New Orleans, Pasadena, Miami, San Diego, Phoenix etc. within the logos.
This kind of imagery helps you remember where the game was, and with that, maybe even who played/won.
It fosters nostalgia and does so in a good, productive way.
Then from XL on it starts getting boring, as the corporatized homogeneity starts to really kick in.
The logo becomes all about the Roman numerals and pretty much nothing else.
Describing these logos is….hmmmm, how I can put this? Well, in 2019, someone asked me “what does the new Bud Light hard seltzer taste like?
“Inoffensive enough, certainly very mainstreamish, but nothing to have really strong feelings about, either way.”
Then at XLV it literally started to become the same thing every year. I mean the exact same thing every single year. Say it with me now, loud and proud, Homer Simpson style: BOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRING!”
Then from L onwards, it was a new corporatized homogeneity, but still SO EFFING DULL!
And once again, just doing the same thing over and over again. This is basically like having a summertime party in Chicago and serving Goose Island 312. It’s playing music and selecting the Katy Perry body of work.
It’s having Paul Rudd as your favorite actor.
It’s being a Caucasian generation X or millennial female and having Grey’s Anatomy as your favorite television show.
In short, it’s trying to be as forgettable as possible, year after year. Congrats NFL, you certainly succeeded at that task. However, the Super Bowl logo from 56 onward has done a bit of a course correction, and that’s a good thing!
Yes, the base image remains the same, and doesn’t evolve year to year, but at least they added some color and local flavor again.
At the very least, we now, once again, have a Super Bowl logo that can immediately tell us where they game was actually played.
This is a step in the right direction.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He currently contributes to USA Today’s NFL Wires Network, the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America and RG. His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Washington Post and ESPN. You can follow him on Linked In and Twitter.