The 2010s are over, the 2020s are here. We made it. After twenty long years, we can finally get back to having a simple, universally accepted name for our decades again. No more of this is “it the zeros or the aughts?” or “is it the teens or the tens?”, it’s the twenties! No debate!
As a decade ends it’s only natural to look back, reflect, remember what’s happened over the past ten years. In the world of logos, we’ve certainly seen a lot. Teams lured into radical rebrands by merchandise sirens during the nineties and ’00s (ugh) slowly came back to their senses over the course of the decade. Entire teams who we thought were long gone came back from the dead either for really reals, like the Winnipeg Jets and Charlotte Hornets, or just for a few games via a throwback uniform — like the Montreal Expos, Vancouver Grizzlies, and Hartford Whalers.
Here at SportsLogos.Net, this was simply a site I worked on in my spare time at the beginning of the 2010s and was something I saw more as just a great place to chat on the forums with some extraordinarily talented and interesting like-minded folks. Now as the decade ends, it has become a full-time “job” for me with regular invitations to attend logo and uniform unveilings in person. Just getting the chance to attend *one* of these events would have been a “pie in the sky” dream ten years ago, now I get to do it four or five times a year — I honestly can’t believe it sometimes. Many of those talented folks who were so involved in our forums ten+ years ago are now very much in the sports design industry, either working for professional sports leagues and teams or running their own successful design agencies, making the sports world look a little better one logo at a time.
Enough of the preamble, let’s get to the graphics.
Across the five* major North American leagues, we saw over one hundred new primary team logos during the 2010s — and only three of those were courtesy the San Diego Padres (of course, they’ve already tallied one in the 2020s).
*-Yes, I’m including Major League Soccer in there, since they wore our site’s logo on their All-Star jersey that one year… kinda
Here’s a look at every single primary team logo to make its in-game debut throughout Major League Baseball, the NHL, the NBA, NFL, and Major League Soccer between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2019.
Yeah, I sure did include every single change in there no matter how minor (and yes, this graphic took me forever to make!). You will need to zoom in to see everything, but if you can’t tell the difference between two logos likely it was just a small colour tweak (see: Cincinnati Reds, Dallas Mavericks). Some of the changes were just re-designating an alternate logo as a primary logo (i.e. Los Angeles Kings, Colorado Rockies). But of course, there were few big changes — the Toronto Blue Jays in 2012, the Dallas Stars in 2013, the Cleveland Brow… Cavaliers in 2017.
Also note that I listed the new logos above (and in all the graphics in this article) based on the year in which they made their in-game debut as the new primary logo, so you’ll have to wait until December 31, 2029, to see the recent Brewers and Padres changes on this graphic.
Of course, as you may or may not know, we’ve also been counting and tabulating your ratings for every single logo on the site for about fifteen years now, and for the first time, I took a look at those results over a ten-year span to assemble this All-Decade Team of the top 100 Primary Logos. This is *not* a ranked graphic, it’s not presented by order of rating. Please go through the entire list and appreciate all of the great designs still being created in the sports world:
Naturally, some of you will disagree with the list (when I saw how high the Miami Dolphins re-design ranked I prepared myself then and there for the comments to come) but this is it, the top 100 new primary logos as rated by the readers of this site over the past ten years. Just in case you were wondering, the Toronto Blue Jays (2012) placed first overall.
I’ve also assembled some year-by-year top 5 graphics which I’ll include later on in this post… read on!
So… Hands up, who here likes charts and tables?
They’re better with logos, I promise.
How about a table with the logos of every team that won a championship in a bunch of North American leagues during the past decade? Yeah! That’s the spirit!
Like the other logo graphics above, I’m going with the calendar year in which the actual championship was clinched here — which may cause some confusion with the Super Bowl and College Football, who instead use the year in which the season started.
How about another one of these, this time let’s look at all the fun event logos across some of the major North American leagues:
Maybe we can cut the Super Bowl a little slack after seeing the NHL and NBA there? Also, it’s slightly alarming how many of these leagues either flirted with or went all the way with deploying the multi-year logo template during this decade. Three cheers for Major League Baseball!
Let’s wrap this up with a breakdown of the top-rated logos from each year from 2010 through 2019. Some of these results will differ from our annual Creamer Awards simply because these are based entirely on the user ratings on the site while our annual Creamer Awards are typically chosen either via a panel of judges and/or polls.
Thanks for checking out our 2010s decade in review post, I spent far more time than I’m proud to admit putting this together so I appreciate you sticking it out to the end.
As a special thank you for reading this far I will reveal the primary logo with the single worst rating to debut during the 2010s, but only for you!
It was the LA Clippers.
Yeah, the pool-noodle looking one from 2015, but I think you already knew that.
Happy New Year, Happy New Decade. See you in 2020!