Sporting Kansas City Logo PNG
The soccer club projects an impeccable image through a simple yet attractive emblem. Designers made the Sporting Kansas City logo stylish to showcase the brand’s modernity and appeal to younger athletes and fans.
Sporting Kansas City is a Major League Soccer team representing two cities. It’s located in Kansas City, Missouri, but plays home matches on the other side of the river, in Kansas City, Kansas. The team moved from the Eastern Conference to the Western Conference in 2010.
On June 6, 1995, the club was introduced as one of the original ten members of MLS. Four months later, the league published its logo and original name, “Kansas City Wiz”. Franchise founder and owner Lamar Hunt said “Wiz” had nothing to do with “The Wizard of Oz.” However, Rob Thomson, Executive Vice President of SKC, believed it referred to Dorothy from Kansas.
Due to claims filed by the New York-based electronics retailer Nobody Beats the Wiz, the team was renamed the Kansas City Wizards in 1996. On August 31, 2006, the Hunt Sports Group sold the soccer club to OnGoal LLC, a group of 6 people led by Cliff Illig and Neal Patterson.
In 2010, the businessmen renamed the franchise to “Sporting Kansas City”. This reflects European influence, particularly from Portugal’s “Sporting Lisbon”. The rebranding had been in preparation since 2007. Among the names considered were “Bees” and “Fountains,” but the owners ultimately chose “Sporting.” They wanted to include rugby and lacrosse teams in the organization, but couldn’t.
The renaming also changed the color palette. The official scheme includes plum, dark indigo, and Sporting blue. Cliff Illig proposed the latter, borrowing it from the women’s basketball franchise Kansas Jayhawks.
Now, “Sporting Kansas City” is owned by Sporting Club (formerly OnGoal LLC). Kansas City business community leaders Pat Curran, Greg Maday, Robb Heineman, Cliff Illig, and the Patterson family manage it.
Meaning and History
Sporting Kansas City had several logos. Initially, the “Sporting Kansas City” logo featured a flying ball, rainbow lines, and the stylish word “Wiz,” which was later replaced with “Wizards” after the team’s renaming. The team updated the graphic symbol in 2011 after moving to Children’s Mercy Park. Slant Design Lab developed the current version.
What is Sporting Kansas City?
Sporting Kansas City is an American professional soccer club, an MLS member, and a representative of the Western Conference. The club’s administrative center is located in Kansas City, Missouri, and its training bases are in Kansas City, Kansas. Businessman Lamar Hunt founded the club in 1995, and it began playing the following year.
1996-1997
In Sporting Kansas City’s history, the team was known for a long period as the “Kansas City Wizards.” At that time, the team had several logos featuring this nickname. The first one was a heraldic shield shaped like an inverted drop, with a black-and-white soccer ball from which four multicolored stripes (yellow, red, green, and purple) radiated. The ball was depicted on a blue background, with the word “WIZ” compressed at the edges below it.
1997 – 2006
The second version of the emblem looked slightly different. The top part of the shield remained semicircular, but the stripe colors changed. Red and green switched places, and blue replaced purple. The bottom half of the emblem changed completely: it became a pentagon, inside which was the club’s full nickname. The word “WIZARDS” was written in pointed letters of varying sizes.
2006 – 2010
In 2007, designers removed the blue semicircle with the ball and multicolored lines. Only the bottom half of the shield remained, but it was given a new shape. It was no longer a simple pentagon but a complex shape with two triangular protrusions at the top. It bore the words “KANSAS CITY WIZARDS”: the first two in blue and the third, as before, in white.
2010 – today
The Sporting Kansas City logo’s drop shape remained unchanged. A white border outlines the triangular heraldic shield with curled edges. The outer contour is plum-colored. The left side of the design features 11 blue and pale-blue lines, one for each player on the field. The cipher “SC” (for “Sporting Club”) sits on the right, set against a dark blue background.
The interlaced letters were inspired by the Spanish architecture of the famous Country Club Plaza shopping center, the Hellenic statue of Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the rod of Asclepius. This is a well-known medical symbol of vitality and health. It’s used as a reference because the CEO and Vice President of the medical company Cerner Corporation co-own the club.
The two sides of the Sporting Kansas City logo symbolize the neighboring cities, Kansas City, Missouri (right) and Kansas City, Kansas (left). An imaginary line divides them, representing the state border between East and West. Two white inscriptions are placed on top: “Kansas City” on the plum border and “Sporting” inside the shield. Designers at Slant Design Lab developed a stylish sans-serif font with straight, sharp angles for the soccer club.
Font and Colors
Until 2010, the team used a wordmark whose main advantage was its unusual letter design. After the 2011 redesign, the players’ jerseys featured an entirely different emblem: a drop-shaped shield (a nod to the first Kansas City Wizards logo) with eleven light and dark blue stripes (as many as the people represented on the field). An important part of the design became the monogram of intertwined “SC” letters.
Designers specifically developed a font for the Sporting Kansas City emblem, officially related to medicine. This is because the vice president and CEO of the American corporation Cerner is part of the club’s ownership group, making the medical theme a fitting choice.
The color palette is also more complex than it seems. For instance, the Sporting Blue color (#93B1D7) was borrowed from another basketball team in another city. To achieve visual harmony, it was combined with dark indigo (#002A5C) and lead (#A0A1A5). White complements the resulting combination and serves as the basis for inscriptions and crests.