A national league, a professional body and a new name.

Spain’s top football division dates from 1929. English Wikipedia says the idea of a national league was proposed in April 1928 by José María Acha, a director at Arenas de Getxo, and that after long debate about its size and membership the Real Federación Española de Fútbol agreed the clubs that would make up the opening Primera División season. Its formal name is the Campeonato Nacional de Liga de Primera División, and Wikipedia notes that it is governed by the Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional, the professional body long known by the initials LFP.

For decades the competition was simply “La Liga”, a descriptive phrase rather than a brand. That changed in 2016. It’s Nice That, in a piece by Jamie Green dated 11 August 2016, reported that the association had decided to change its name from LFP to LaLiga, a change approved by the general assembly of the Spanish football federation, and that the visual identity had been refreshed to go with it. The same year the top division dropped its previous title sponsor’s name: Wikipedia’s list of main sponsors runs Liga BBVA from 2008 to 2016, LaLiga Santander from 2016 to 2023 and LALIGA EA Sports from 2023.

The 2023 change was more than a sponsor swap. Sportcal, a sports-business title published by GlobalData, reported on 5 June 2023 that EA Sports, the video game developer, had expanded its partnership with the league the previous August into a deal covering naming rights for all LaLiga competitions, including the second tier, the youth tournament LaLiga Promises and the eLaLiga esports competition. As part of that agreement, the report said, the league agreed to a complete rebrand that would bring EA Sports into its logos, graphics, fonts and other visual elements. The bank Santander, the previous title sponsor, gave way to the games company from the 2023–24 season.

LaLiga’s managing director for the UK and Ireland, Keegan Pierce, told Sportcal that the league “had been thinking about rebranding for three or four years” before the new sponsorship began, and saw its start as the moment to launch.

A wheel of colour, softened, then replaced.

The mark long associated with LaLiga arrived in 1993. Creative Bloq, in a piece by Joe Foley in April 2023, described it as a football surrounded by a ring of coloured patches running from red to violet, and said that while sponsors came and went the main mark stayed largely the same, with the accompanying logotype updated a couple of times. City AM, reporting on 5 June 2023, likewise said the old logo had been part of the competition in some form since 1993.

The 2016 refresh kept that wheel. It’s Nice That credited the work to IS Creative Studio, whose founder and creative director Richars Meza told the magazine that the rainbow colour scheme had been tweaked, the ball modernised and the fanning petals refined. Meza said the team softened and rounded the corners of the ring to give it a warmer feel, redrew the ball so it looked as if it were coming towards the viewer rather than sitting flat, and made the colours more vivid because the logo would be seen mostly on screens and social media. The typography changed too: the studio chose Futura Maxi as the main typeface for a family of sub-brands and GT Pressura as a secondary face, with a lowercase wordmark meant to feel friendlier. Meza added that LaLiga’s in-house team applied the guidelines across its online and social channels.

The 2023 rebrand dropped the wheel. Sportcal reported that the multicoloured wheel would be replaced by a red double L for the league’s initials, and that the league said the two Ls reflected two moments of a match: a player’s knee-slide goal celebration and fans with their arms in the air. The name was also reset as LALIGA, one word in capital letters. City AM reported the slogan “The Power of our Fútbol” and quoted Ángel Fernández, LaLiga’s head of global brand and strategy, calling the new brand a symbol of the league’s change over the previous decade.

The Brand Identity, on 23 August 2023, credited the identity to the Madrid creative studio Grávita, saying it turned LaLiga into LALIGA as a brand rather than a competition descriptor, drew a new wordmark, and created a flag for fans as an expression of pride. Wikipedia adds that the league introduced a sonic identity the same year, used across broadcasts and stadiums.

Design and documentation.

A league or event identity has to work at sizes a single club badge rarely meets. The same emblem may sit on a sleeve patch, a corner flag, a ticket, a mobile app icon and a screen graphic in the corner of a live broadcast, often within the same afternoon. That pushes designers toward simple silhouettes, a limited set of colours and a wordmark that stays readable when it is shrunk to a few pixels or stretched across a stand.

Title sponsorship adds a second layer. When a company buys naming rights, its name is set beside or inside the competition mark, and the lock-up has to change when the contract ends. Organisers often keep a core symbol stable and treat the sponsor line as a replaceable module, so that kits, signage and graphics can be updated without redrawing the whole system.

Trophy imagery is a third resource. A cup, plate or shield is a recognisable shape, and some identities borrow its outline for the emblem itself. Broadcast graphics then extend the system with score bugs, line-up cards and motion templates, which is where a custom typeface or a strict grid tends to show its value.

From descriptor to brand in seven years.

LaLiga’s identity story is mostly about one decision taken twice. In 2016 the organisation renamed itself and chose to keep the 1993 wheel, asking IS Creative Studio to refine rather than replace it. In 2023 it renamed itself again, this time in typography alone, and chose to let the wheel go. Between the two lies a shift in where the mark was expected to live: Meza spoke in 2016 about colours made brighter for phones, and in 2023 the league told Sportcal that it wanted to be seen as a digital-forward league.

The sponsor lock-up is built into that system. Sportcal reported in June 2023 that a version of the logo including an EA Sports element would follow later, and that the new mark would appear on club kits in time for the league’s image campaign ahead of the 2023–24 season. That is how a league badge differs from a club crest: it is a patch on someone else’s shirt, sitting beside a club’s own colours, and it has to carry a commercial partner’s name without losing its own shape.

The double L also gives LaLiga a symbol that can stand on its own, without the word beneath it. Creative Bloq reported in April 2023 that early leaked images divided fans, some finding the angular letters hard to read. The league’s own reading, reported by Sportcal, is that the shape is a goal celebration seen from two sides of the barrier.

For a design guide, LaLiga shows how a league can move from a multicoloured emblem to a single-colour monogram while keeping the competition recognisable, and how a title sponsor can be designed in as a module rather than drawn into the symbol. Compare it with the Premier League, which reworked its own lion mark in 2016, and Real Madrid, one of the clubs whose kits carry the league patch. For this guide we use coral red, night and pitch white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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