And it could well have appeared even earlier than that. However, some sterling detective work by Paul Lukas at Uni-Watch uncovered a stripeless version appearing on posters and ticket stubs as early as 1964. Many sources – including, for whatever reason, the NFL themselves – like to claim that the stripeless version of the logo made its debut in 1984. Bye-bye stripes: from 1960s to 1983Īt some point in the mid 20th Century, the NFL elected to remove the stripes from its logo, making the resemblance to the US flag a little more subtle (though not a lot).

Look, when we said that records of the early days of the NFL logo are spotty, we really weren’t kidding. When the 2008 revamp was announced, the NFL’s then-director of brand and creative operations Jaime Weston said, 'After researching the shield's origins, the designers could find no reason for 25 stars.’' So what was the rationale behind the number of stars on the NFL logo? The actual American flag currently has 50 stars, and at the time these logos were being designed, would have had somewhere between 47 and 50, depending on the year. In subsequent versions this would later stabilise to 25 stars. On the realistic version it was around 26 (again, it depends a bit on what you count) and here it’s 22. The first version of the logo had around 20 visible stars, depending on how generous you are with what you count as a star. In both cases, the lettering can happily change back to its distinctive red. There are a couple of different variants listed online as the version of the NFL logo from this period – one with black stripes, one with red. It is generally agreed that the NFL logo went through a pinstripe phase (didn’t we all) from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, though the precise dates are uncertain.

Nfl logo pop art