Stealing the Signs: A Semiotic Analysis of the Changing Nature of Professional Sports Logos

This paper explores the changing nature of professional sports logos, using semiotics and the work of postmodern writers like Baudrillard, Debord, and Jameson as its theoretical framework. Brandishing a professional sports team’s logo was once a sign of allegiance; it signified the person’s love for his/her favorite team. A number of forces, including television and the aggressive marketing of sports-related collectibles, have indelibly changed the relationship between fan and team. On one level, logos ‘imply social rapport and social power’ (Baudrillard 1983: 88). Wearing culturally endorsed logos of culturally endorsed teams guarantees status to the wearer. But, on another level, logos reveal the diminution of the fan’s role. Fans have been reduced to buying an endless stream of team-related products, our actions ‘channeled into the global construction of the spectacle’, as Debord would argue. The uniqueness of the logo, and its original reference to connection with a team, has been erased. Where in the past fans used the logo to trumpet their ‘contact’ with a team and its players, ‘contact’ today is achieved by purchasing the goods manufactured and licensed by the team. Teams have successfully constructed an anti-player, pro-sport discourse that binds fans to them and to their products. As Coombe suggests, teams have interpellated a fan ‘with a more visual orientation and with more corporeal desires—desires met both by material consumption and by visual consumption of embodied others made available through the mass media’ (Coombe 1998: 171).