♫ It was twenty years ago today! ♫ as Paul McCartney shouted to kick off the most famous album in music history… appropriate to kick off this post because, well, today is twenty years — to the day — that I launched this here sports logos website.
At the age of fourteen, in my parents’ livingroom on June 6th, 1997 I quickly put together a collection of baseball and hockey logos I found during a series of Lycos searches (pre-Google!) up on to a free web hosting service known as Tripod.
Who would have possibly predicted that I’d still be doing this here now in my mid-thirties?
It was a lot of hard work, plenty of long nights, and a whole heap of help from the multitudes of family and new friends who I’ve made along the way. Thank you to all of you and to those who have been following the site — both longtime visitors and our new followers.
Since that launch in 1997 the site has grown and grown and grown, now with over 30,000 images in its collection from over 200 leagues across the globe. We went from being a thorn in the side of leagues and teams, getting emails requesting we remove their logos from the site to now actually getting emails asking us why their logos *aren’t* on the site. Getting invitations to attend and cover their new logo and uniform launches, and in some cases now working with them in an official capacity. It’s all still quite unbelievable to me.
To celebrate our twentieth we put together this graphic showing every new primary team logo in the “big four” leagues (MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA) to be introduced since the site started up. There’s 191 of them… and that’s just the primary logos in those four leagues, this doesn’t include all the alternate logos, jersey logos, cap logos, helmet logos, or any of teams from the 200 other leagues which have all been introducing new logos during that span.
We covered each and every one of those unveilings in one way or another. Some of those teams even came and went during that time.
If you’d like a reminder of how those leagues actually looked when we started up, well, prepare for some wicked flashbacks:
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TURN BACK THE CLOCK SITE!
Finally, what anniversary event in our world wouldn’t be complete without a “turn back the clock” game… or in the case of a website, a throwback layout! I re-built the design of this website used from 1999-2001, populated with all of today’s news and logos.
If you’re a longtime reader you may remember this version of the site, if you’re a bit younger, prepare for the world of the text-heavy days of the Internet (dial-up was a pain! nobody had time to load images!). Check it out!
We’re selling some 20th anniversary merchandise, so far we got some super high quality jersey patches courtesy The Emblem Source. Check those out here!