As is often the case, Ethan Strauss dropped a fascinating post last week about how Nike1 helped break the the visual identity of the NBA:
In it, he points out that the phenomenon of teams seldom wearing white jerseys at home anymore can be traced back to Nike’s takeover of the league’s uniform deal in 2017, which dissolved traditional home-versus-away jersey designations in favor of a rotating wardrobe of stylized “editions” known as: Association (basically the old home whites), Icon (basically the old road jerseys), Statement (alternate/third jerseys), City (experimental looks that supposedly tie into local culture) and Classic (revivals of throwback designs).
I personally hated this move, and Strauss argues that it has diluted NBA teams’ brands and alienated fans — all driven by a misguided corporate strategy to artificially boost apparel sales (which ultimately failed to do much for Nike’s flagging business anyway). And my friends at The Pudding have a great dataviz project illustrating just how much this change ended up warping the league’s visual identity: NBA teams went from wearing their typical home white jersey2 83 percent of the time in 2013-14 on average, to wearing its current equivalent just 23 percent of the time in 2023-24.3
But as I read and researched more on the topic, I realized that this trend goes well beyond Nike and the NBA — even if they are the worst offenders. Across all of the major men’s pro sports leagues, the universal visual shorthand of “team in white is at home” is fading away… if it ever was actually universal to begin with.
Take the NFL, our most popular sports league in America. Going back many decades, pro football’s norm is actually to wear white jerseys on the road, with primary colors making their appearance at home. Technically, the long-standing rule (since 1964) states that:
Home clubs shall choose their jersey color (either white or official team color) and visiting clubs must wear the opposite. The two competing teams may wear jerseys in their official colors (non-white), provided the Commissioner determines that such colors are of sufficient contrast.
Teams historically chose to wear their primary colors at home, so the NFL’s default jersey standard became home-color and road-white, with some exceptions — most notably being the Dallas Cowboys (who almost always wear white at home) and teams in hot climates during the tail-end of summer (as a means of gaining home-field advantage by overheating the opponent).
Those aren’t the only cases of inverting the usual pattern, though. I went back through the Gridiron Uniform Database in 5-year intervals since 1990, tracking the share of all regular-season games in which the home team wore white jerseys:
Over the decades, the NFL has maintained a steady baseline of teams bucking the home-color trend at least 15 percent of the time, peaking around 25 percent in the mid-1990s with the rise of 75th anniversary throwbacks and other alternate unis. But in recent years, there hasn’t been much more than a slight uptick in the prevalence of white jerseys at home — this has just never really been much of a thing in football.
Now, perhaps the canonical sport for home-white/road-gray jerseys is baseball, where MLB has a literal rule that teams must maintain a “distinctive… white [uniform] for home games and a different color for road games”. But based on data from SportsLogos.net’s tracker, that eternal standard has given way to less of the usual white-gray rule in favor of holiday specials, colorful weekend alternates and the dreaded “City Connect” concept — another Nike invention that sees teams don garishly non-traditional unis under the banner of civic pride (I guess).
Back in 1990, white or gray made up roughly 94 percent of all jerseys worn in MLB games. Since the mid-2010s, however, colors (36 percent) have actually overtaken both white (34 percent) and gray (31 percent) as the most common jersey configuration in MLB.4
I was unable to get game-by-game data for seasons between 1994 (1 percent color jerseys) and 2012 (26 percent), so we don’t precisely know when things truly accelerated toward their current trajectory. But if I had to guess, I would say it happened around the turn of the century, when a trend of teal-clad expansion teams, unnecessary black uniform variants and sleeveless vests took over baseball.
That era laid a lot of the groundwork for what we see today: As part of the sports retail boom of the late ‘90s, teams seeking to sell more merchandise began rolling out an endless array of alternate jerseys, in a precursor to what Nike would push yet another version of in the late 2010s and 2020s. White and gray would never again make up 90%+ of all MLB jerseys, or anything close to it.
As for the NHL, it has a particularly inconsistent history around whether teams wear white or colored jerseys at home. In the early-to-mid 1950s, home teams wore white — but for the 1955-56 season, the league mandated that teams wear their primary colors at home and white jerseys on the road instead. This policy remained in place for nearly two decades, before flipping again in 1970-71, when home-white/road-color became the standard once more.
That was the NHL I grew up with, more or less. But as hockey gained in popularity among younger fans in the ‘90s, the league shook things up again by chasing the extreme-sports aesthetic that had permeated so much of the culture in that era. It debuted a “third jersey” program in 1995 — carving out space for experimental fits not unlike today’s City Connect or NBA “edition” uniforms — leading to some outlandish looks that have aged both badly and beautifully (often at the same time):
In addition to being, let’s just say, acquired tastes, those jerseys created logistical problems by being too colorful. Under the home-white system, if a host team wanted to wear their new alternate jerseys in front of the fans most likely to buy them, the visiting team then had to pack TWO sets of uniforms — both their white and their dark jerseys — for the road trip, in case the home squad was wearing its garish third.
This was annoying, to say the least. So in 2003, to eliminate the luggage headaches for traveling equipment managers, the NHL made dark jerseys the standard at home again, with white reserved for the road. Now, a home team could wear their primary-color or alternate jersey without forcing the visitor to bring extra gear for the trip.
That was 23 years ago, meaning it’s been decades since NHL teams wore white at home — and if you’re noticing a trend across all of these sports in recent years, it’s that they never move toward more home-white jersey usage. At best, the NFL has remained at the same (very low) level, amidst the usual norm of home-color jerseys, while the other leagues have all seen their home-white jersey standards erode or disappear almost completely.
Below, I made a rough visual representation of this trend — marking a league as a full unit in a year if home teams almost always wore white jerseys, a partial unit if they had some consistent presence (above, say, the NFL’s current level) of gray/dark/colored jerseys at home, and an empty unit if teams seldom wore white jerseys at home:
This begins to help explain why, for fans in or around my generation (I’m 40), it’s odd to no longer see home teams wearing white uniforms: we grew up at the peak of the phenomenon from the 1980s through the mid-’90s, when NBA, MLB and NHL teams always (by rule or practice) wore white at home, and even the NFL had a surprising portion of the league wear white jerseys in almost every home game. To us, the subsequent move away from that cross-sport consistency is a violation of the visual language that sports had established for our entire lives.
Here in 2026, the NBA only wears its traditional home white uniforms 20-25 percent of the time, MLB home teams have re-allocated a third of their games from wearing white to color jerseys, NFL teams wear white at home only a little more than 15 percent of the time, and the NHL very rarely has its teams wear anything but primary or alt-color unis at home.
Obviously, this is hardly the biggest issue facing sports today. But it’s an overlooked one, because being a fan of these leagues is about the meaning we place upon them, and a lot of that comes from symbology, ritual and visual continuity. As Ethan put it in his piece:
[T]his is one of those issues where nearly everyone harbors a hatred for the new status quo. I’m not saying this is the biggest problem in professional sports, but it is a reliably needlessly aggravating one. Sports fans want uniforms to be…uniform. The colors of classic brands conjure nostalgia and help maintain a connection. Why mess with one of the medium’s value propositions?
Although home-whites were never quite as universal a standard as they seemed, for a long stretch of modern sports history they provided a shared, cross-sport language. The home team looked one way, the visitors looked another, and you could understand the scene at a glance.
Whether in service of unwanted “innovation” or selling fans one more jersey, that language has been broken more and more in recent years. And maybe that sounds like a silly thing to mourn, but sports are built on silly things that become meaningful through repetition. Take enough of them away, and the games just don’t feel right anymore.
Filed under: Uniforms
One of Ethan’s recurring beats/punching bags.
To be fair, this understates the amount of white technically being worn at home, since some of the non-“Association” looks are also white (or lighter shaded), though they are still alternate designs relative to the team’s traditional home uniform.
Basically, color jerseys have cannibalized white and gray pretty much equally since the mid-1990s.
Right on Neil! Loved home whites although I always wondered why the New York Rangers were called the Broadway Blues or Blueshirts!