A Political History of the NFL Jersey

When the U.S. economy and public life ground to a halt in the spring of 2020, America’s most popular sport¹JEFFREY M. JONES, “Football Retains Dominant Position as Favorite U.S. Sport,” Gallup, FEBRUARY 7, 2024. news.gallup.com/poll/610046/football-retains-dominant-position-favorite-sport.aspx went through a makeover. In the weeks before the NFL’s first-ever virtual draft,²Michael Silver, “New Virtual Reality,” NFL.com, April 27, 2021. https://www.nfl.com/news/sidelines/the-untold-stories-of-the-nfl-s-2020-virtual-draft seven of its 32 teams announced that they would begin the 2020 season with new or modified uniforms.³J.P. Scott, “Grading the NFL’s New Uniforms for the 2020 Season,” Athlon Sports, MAY 27, 2020. https://athlonsports.com/nfl/grading-nfl-new-uniforms-season-2020

Each design change was the result of yearslong, backroom conversations between team executives and marketing staff, the NFL’s creative division, and Nike — which has held an exclusive contract to design NFL uniforms since 2012.

For these multi-billion dollar enterprises, new jerseys were potent marketing tools. Color and pattern changes suggested a delicate push and pull between nostalgia and modernization, reasserting each team’s place in the political economy surrounding it. When the Atlanta Falcons unveiled their first redesign in 17 years, for example, a press release asserted that they were “updating the brand to match the modern progression of Atlanta.” In the process, they invoked the city’s own brand of “liberal” Southern urbanism — equally defined by massive cultural industries, rising gentrification, and urban development shaped by policing. 

The Los Angeles Rams used new jerseys to advertise the nearly-completed SoFi Stadium — now “the most expensive sports stadium ever built.” According to Rams COO Kevin Demoff, the 620 billion) sent letters to the team’s top corporate backers, urging them to pull their sponsorships unless the “Redskins” look changed for good.

When over 70% of NFL players are Black, the league’s aesthetics hold another layer of racial subtext. Jersey sales are a key marker of a player’s celebrity (or infamy) — for example, after San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat in protest during the National Anthem, his jersey became the NFL’s top seller within two weeks. They also reflect a player’s value as a brand, representing their team’s ownership and their city’s economy. A 2023 study of the NFL’s racial demographics noted that its majority-Black labor base has become “a commodity of significant value due to their athletic abilities and financial potential. They are reduced to what their bodies can produce, used, and ‘never theoretically far from the plantation fields.’” 

There’s a deep tension between the NFL’s many “racial justice initiatives” and its nationalistic fervor — between the hyper-visibility of Blackness and the structural racism that persists on and off the field. Jerseys hold all this tension, too, as descendants of the “ready-made” — a technology of racial capitalism that tied chattel slavery to northern industry. Aesthetics are a way to obscure the levers of structural power while gesturing at their ever-present effects. They blur the lines between nostalgia and futurism, between celebrity and commodity, between America’s cult of individualism and its endless drive towards national unity.

As Marxist critic Terry Eagleton wrote in 2002, “every society… carves out a sort of quasi-sacred realm for itself, over and above these pragmatic affairs, in which it seems possible for one blessed moment to be free of all that turgidly prosaic stuff and brood instead on the very meaning of the human.” American culture has historically claimed professional sports as one of these spaces, drawing from “the popular mythology that situates sport in the less ‘serious’ realm of entertainment.” But the NFL’s visual palette betrays its fundamentally political character.

To return briefly to Colin Kaepernick, his decision to protest police violence in his uniform came just months before a presidential election. After Donald Trump’s first victory, Kaepernick’s protest left him blackballed from the industry that had made him a star. This fall, 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa sported a “Make America Great Again” hat with his uniform during a postgame TV segment — less than two weeks before the election and in clear violation of the league’s uniform policy. The NFL “deliberately” waited until Trump’s second victory to fine Bosa, hoping to avoid a political scandal; in the background, NFL owners made more than $28 million in national political donations — 83% of which went “to conservative candidates and causes.” 

In both cases, the uniform began to mean something beyond sports and celebrity. Two men wore a symbol of settlers hoping to mine the land for all it was worth. Each one had his own vision of what that history meant and what kind of future it demands — but in a way, the jersey makes its own intervention. Do politics “ruin the escapism, sense of unity and entertainment that sports provide”? According to one 2021 study, “US adults commonly agree that sports teach love of country, competition as a way of life, respect for the military, and how to be American.” This element of sports cannot maintain itself without the overt and subtle visual cues that reinforce it. Whether we’re comfortable acknowledging it or not, the NFL is no distraction. It repackages empire, slavery, and capital into something abstract, archetypal, and fundamentally entertaining. ~