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 $5.95 billion construction “encouraged us to design uniforms as innovative as our new home,” including color gradients, a reflective finish on the jersey numbers, and a new shade of white called “bone” to “[reflect] the color of an actual Rams horn and the beaches of Los Angeles.” That summer, the team pushed their updated image with “augmented reality” tech designed by Snapchat, as well as free merchandise for first responders and healthcare workers. Meanwhile, two construction workers died, dozens more caught COVID, and “residents of historically Black and Latinx neighborhoods [were] pushed out” due to rising rents and police presence in the parts of Inglewood around the stadium.
The modern NFL is a complex political juggernaut, and visual aesthetics are one of its defining elements. As pro football became an industry, its sense of style became a powerful tool to recruit corporate and governmental allies, keep up with the pace of mass culture, and, of course, to keep fans materially invested in their teams. In turn, deciding what players wear on the field has become a highly intricate process. Design choices can take half a decade to complete, while Nike’s manufacturing division produces “tens of thousands” of jerseys each season — often producing individual jerseys on demand between weekly games. At the same time, replica jerseys have become a central part of American fashion, and licensing deals have become a cornerstone of the league’s revenue.
“It’s counterintuitive, but early football’s lack of sartorialism actively shaped the mythos of several professional teams.”
In this context, NFL jerseys have become a coat of arms for pro football’s distinct cultural tradition, which continually dramatizes the interplay between corporate patronage, the military-industrial complex, the peculiar spiritualism of fandom, and the stadium economy as a force of gentrification and environmental destruction. Football’s most important merchandise offers a unique lens into how capitalist imperialism has fundamentally shaped America’s visual culture in the past century.
The origins of professional football lie in the late nineteenth-century university (particularly in New England) and midwestern industrial towns of the early twentieth century. But the origins of the modern NFL jersey predate the sport. The mass production of standardized clothing — so-called “ready-made” garments — first appeared as U.S. textile firms rapidly industrialized before the Civil War. At the same time, a similar market sprang up for “negro cloth,” a broad term for the “linen, cotton, and woolen fabrics” used to cheaply outfit slaves. Both “ready-mades” and “negro cloth” reflected “the overlapping political economies of the Northern mill village, the Southern plantation, and the nation-state itself”: Northern businessmen purchased cotton picked with slave labor, made garments in low-wage factories, and sometimes sold the results back to southern plantations.
As American football evolved from rugby and soccer after the Civil War, its look was mostly unregulated and decidedly pragmatic. The typical uniform was simply made, with little protection; jerseys were usually “long-sleeved turtlenecks and sweaters” made from wool or cotton. Players frequently brought their own clothes from home. Sporting goods suppliers dipped into this emerging market: companies like Spalding (founded in 1876) and Russell Athletic (founded in 1902) designed simply knit, monochromatic uniforms fit for the game’s pageantry and perceived brutality. Some teams added a canvas vest or jacket (known as a “foot ball jacket”) for increased padding at the expense of mobility.
It’s counterintuitive, but early football’s lack of sartorialism actively shaped the mythos of several professional teams. In 1901, Chicago building contractor Chris O’Brien bought used jerseys from the University of Chicago for his amateur team, the Racine Normals. In traditional narratives of the team’s history, O’Brien commented that the jerseys’ color had faded from maroon to “cardinal red” — leading the team to change its name to the Racine Cardinals. (They’re now based in Phoenix, Arizona.)
By the 1930s, “durene” — a type of treated cotton — became the standard material for jerseys. Russell Athletic began producing cotton sweatshirts for football in 1932, connecting its southern textile mills to sporting goods distributors in New York. Early NFL teams began experimenting with bolder colors and functional patterns (like vertical canvas stripes on uniforms to help grip the ball), creating distinct visual identities that regional fanbases could latch onto. The league also began inching toward standardization, developing new rules to distinguish itself from collegiate play. But there was still no mass coordination of jersey production or a unified aesthetic sensibility.
As Jeffrey T. Schnapp writes, industrial textile production “assigned to fabrics a central, symbolically charged place in the universe of commodities, so much so that the textile sector was viewed as a key indicator of a modern nation-state’s ability to project its power at home and abroad.” With the specter of global warfare reaching American shores, jersey manufacturers sometimes redirected their resources toward the U.S. military. Spalding produced infantry and cavalry fencing masks for the military during World War I; during World War II, it formed a consortium with five other civil goods manufacturers in New England to produce automatic rifles. At the same time, Russell Athletic became a major clothing supplier to the U.S. Army and Navy.
After World War II, changes in the textile and communications industries created new incentives for NFL jerseys to command a spectator’s gaze on their own. Football was becoming an industry unto itself, while football players increasingly became brands distinct from their teams. Two major technological innovations ushered in this new period.
One was the development and mass marketing of synthetic fibers — particularly nylon, which made its commercial debut in 1938. At first pitching nylon to American consumers as an accessible alternative to silk, DuPont quickly shifted to military manufacturing during World War II. Massive amounts of nylon were used for “parachutes and tire cords,” “aircraft fuel tanks, flak jackets, shoelaces, mosquito netting, and hammocks.” In the postwar years, nylon took off by storm as DuPont reentered the civilian clothing market. As textile manufacturers began courting the fashion world with synthetic fibers, ready-to-wear clothing became a central focus, especially in sportswear.
For the NFL, nylon allowed jerseys to have a wider range of colors and designs while improving their specialized athletic function. Teams frequently paired durene with layers of nylon or rayon (a “semi-synthetic fiber” that became popular before World War II). Not only were synthetic fabrics distinctly “modern” in their mythos — symbols of America’s headlong scientific progress — but DuPont intentionally “tied synthetics’ rising star to the democratization of consumption.” Emphasizing the stretchability and breathability of synthetic or hybrid fabrics, ads for DuPont products often “subtly equated freedom of physical movement with the freedom of consumer choice.”
The shift to synthetic fibers coincided with another central moment in professional sports: the democratization of color TV. After the war, “television executives saw sport as an effective means to increase the sales of television sets” and spur innovations in broadcasting technology. But collegiate football still eclipsed professional leagues in popularity until the 1960s, when Pete Rozelle became the NFL’s commissioner. A former team executive with a “dual background in newspapers and public relations.” Rozelle transformed the NFL’s business structure. In 1963, he convinced team owners to found NFL Properties, Inc.: a new subsidiary that would consolidate the league’s branding, marketing, and design.
In 1965, CBS aired the first color broadcast of an NFL game. A year later, the NFL announced a merger with its biggest competitor, the American Football League, forming a combined league with 26 teams. Each team made deals with jersey suppliers on their own, with few limits. “Broad striping,” “colored facemasks and bright colors” became a common trend, as teams sought to viscerally grab the viewer’s attention. Between 1973 and 1977, six teams changed their uniforms for a single season only.
At the same time, “the close-up-centered basis of television helped transform sport performers into stars and celebrities.” The former AFL had teams iron players’ surnames on their jerseys to highlight standout players; when the two leagues merged in 1970, the new, combined NFL kept this rule. The emergence of players as brands allowed their jerseys to enter the visual lexicon of corporate advertising. Steelers defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Greene epitomized this new synergy in a famous 1979 Coca-Cola ad, “in which the weary warrior, suddenly softened, tosses his game jersey to an awestruck kid who has given him his Coke.”
Soon after the AFL-NFL merger, fans began appearing at games in replica jerseys, a stark contrast to the formal attire worn a generation prior. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden points to a loose network of local sporting goods suppliers that outfitted high school, college, and professional teams. Many local stores “had the materials to jury-rig ‘replica’ jerseys at any customer’s asking”; some suppliers bought surplus fabric to mass-produce knockoffs.
Eventually, the NFL seized on this emerging market, officially licensing jersey production to private manufacturers. Hip-hop’s entry into mainstream culture made NFL jerseys an essential part of streetwear in the early 90s. In California, law enforcement and anti-violence activists claimed that pro sports apparel was becoming a sign of gang affiliation. That rhetoric was so widespread, the NFL sent socially conscious rapper KRS-One to youth groups around the country with a message: “NFL merchandise is meant to be a message of goodwill and not a uniform of war and gangs.”
Ironically, this period marked a turning point in the NFL’s relationship to the U.S. military. During Super Bowl XXV, which took place ten days after the U.S. officially launched Operation Desert Storm, the two industries’ visual palette overlapped in striking ways. “On a war update during the pre-game show,” for example, “a military analyst drew on a map with a technique developed for football replays.” The New York Giants and Buffalo Bills — who both happened to wear red, white, and blue — echoed the ocean of patriotic flags, hats, and signs across the stadium, putting the country’s commitment to its new war front and center on a global platform.
Over the next 15 years, a number of teams revamped their jerseys again. They tended to move from brighter shades to darker, more metallic ones — like the New England Patriots in 1993 (red to navy blue); the Philadelphia Eagles (kelly green to midnight green), Denver Broncos (powder blue to dark blue), and Tampa Bay Buccaneers (creamsicle orange to red and pewter) in 1997; and the St. Louis Rams (royal blue to navy blue and yellow to champagne gold) in 2000. Craig Wheeler’s archive of uniform styles also notes a rise in alternate uniforms, adding that “in 2002 ten clubs went with monochromatic dark alternates.”
Some of these choices were driven by the corporatization of jersey design and production: Wheeler argues that teams were pushing “an overall modernized image to coincide with the popularity of the football world’s visual identity.” But the sleek, dark futurism that gripped pro football in this period reflected the growing importance of digital culture and the technological leaps made lethally evident during our wars in the Middle East. The NFL’s emphasis on visual branding also helped drown out critiques of these wars as the league took on an increasing role as a private propaganda arm for the military. As Peter Swope writes in the Brown Political Review, the ubiquity of militarism in the NFL “plays a key role in crafting how everyday Americans feel about the military, leading to a sense of reverence for U.S. militarism that manufactures public consent for ongoing American neoimperialist military interventions.”
Image 1: Football players waiting for play to resume. Photo: Luis Santoyo; Image 2: Denver Broncos uniforms, 1997-2012, post-1997 rebrand, with the redesigned “cyber horse” logo. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; Image 3: Denver Broncos home and away uniforms, 1968-1996. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
We can see this in the legacy of Pat Tillman, a former Arizona Cardinal who was killed in “one of the most infamous friendly-fire incidents in U.S. military history.” Within both the NFL and the military, prevailing narratives about Tillman have focused on his decision to enlist in the army just after 9/11, downplaying that he referred to the occupation of Iraq as “illegal and unjust” and that the military tried to cover up the circumstances surrounding his death. Soldiers burned Tillman’s army uniform and body armor as part of that cover-up, but his NFL jersey remained at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan until American troops officially withdrew in 2021.
At times, the NFL’s military bonafides have shaped jersey design more explicitly. At the start of the 2015 season, former Cleveland Browns coach Mike Pettine commissioned practice jerseys with a brown, orange, and white “digital camo” pattern. The NFL also maintains a line of military-themed merch as part of its “Salute to Service” initiative, with black, brown, olive green, and camo designs. Private companies produce the merch on the NFL’s behalf as “licensees”; the NFL takes a cut of the proceeds (anywhere between 5% and 20% of the purchase price) and its nonprofit arm gives out grants for “programs that improve the health and wellbeing of service members, veterans, their families, and caregivers.”
Cowboys, Patriots, 49ers,4“49er” refers to miners, prospectors, and fortune hunters who flocked to northern California during the 1849 Gold Rush. Buffalo Bills, Vikings, and Raiders: all stylized tropes of Euro-American warfare and plunder. The role of the conqueror as a mythic figure is firmly embedded in the settler-colonial imaginary. TV cameras, all too eager to play along, make pro sports matches into little wars. Western expansion holds a central place in this visual language, and game narration, oscillating between historical conquerors and avatars of raw power, relies on battle metaphors for dramatic flair.
This colonial visual lexicon comes through in many of the NFL’s dominant color schemes — like the red, white, and blue of the Patriots, Bills, Texans, Giants, and former Oilers, echoing the national color palette. It’s also the source of the long-running controversy surrounding the Chiefs and former Redskins, where the use of red in team names and logos continually reproduces anti-indigenous stereotypes.
In the summer of 2020, the Washington Redskins finally relinquished their name and removed their trademark caricatures from their jerseys. Team management had stubbornly resisted decades of pressure from indigenous communities, but the George Floyd uprisings changed the stakes, sparking a wave of nominally “antiracist” corporate and institutional rebrands.
A press release vaguely cited “recent events around our country and feedback from our community.” Around the country, Christopher Columbus statues had become targets of vandalism. Weeks of racial justice protests in D.C. were met with militarized police forces — including an attempt to tear down a statue of indigenous genocidaire Andrew Jackson. Most importantly for the Redskins, almost 100 investors and shareholders (with a combined net worth of $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. ~
