A sports society named after a region, not a city.

Lazio was founded on 9 January 1900 in Rome as the Società Podistica Lazio, in the Prati district, according to English Wikipedia. Football Italia, marking the anniversary on 9 January 2018, said the club was founded in the Piazza della Libertà by a group of nine Roman men led by the athlete and former soldier Luigi Bigiarelli, who formed the club with eight friends.

The name was a deliberate choice of scale. The same Football Italia piece said the founders wanted to be seen as representing more than the city of Rome, and so chose Lazio, the name of the region that contains it. The club began as a multi-sport society before becoming known chiefly for football; its full name today is Società Sportiva Lazio, usually shortened to SS Lazio or simply Lazio. Wikipedia says the club played at an amateur level until 1910 and officially joined league competition in 1912, when the Italian Football Federation began organising championships in central and southern Italy.

Lazio’s independence is part of its story in the capital. Wikipedia says that in 1927, when three other Rome clubs merged to form AS Roma, Lazio was the major Roman club that stayed out of the merger. The two clubs now share a home: Wikipedia says the Stadio Olimpico, on the Foro Italico, opened in 1937 and is the home of both clubs and of the Italy national team. During the 1989–90 season, while the Olimpico was being renovated, both played at the Stadio Flaminio.

Ownership has been settled for two decades. Wikipedia says Claudio Lotito bought the club from Sergio Cragnotti in 2004, and that Lazio, a company listed on the Borsa Italiana since 1998, has Lotito as its main shareholder. Lotito has controlled the club since 2004. Wikipedia also describes his stadium plans: in 2019 he was set to present designs for a new ground to be called the Stadio delle Aquile, and from July 2021 he turned instead to the idea of a renovated Stadio Flaminio, depositing a proposal with the city of Rome in March 2025.

Greek colours and a Roman bird.

The colours point to Greece rather than Rome. English Wikipedia says Lazio’s white and sky blue were inspired by the national emblem of Greece: because Lazio was a mixed sports club, the founders chose them in recognition of the link between Greece, the Ancient Olympic Games and the European sporting tradition. Football Italia made the same point in 2018, saying the founders chose sky blue in tribute to ancient Greece. The pairing gave the club its Italian nickname, Biancocelesti, “the white and sky blues”.

The kit took a while to settle. Wikipedia says Lazio originally wore a shirt divided into white and sky blue quarters, with black shorts and socks, then spent a period in a plain white shirt very early on before returning to the colours it wears today. Some seasons have brought sky blue and white stripes, but the usual home kit is a sky blue shirt with white trim, white shorts and white socks.

The eagle is the club’s symbol, and its meaning is told two ways. Wikipedia says the eagle was chosen by founding member Luigi Bigiarelli as a symbol of the Roman legions and the emperor, standing for power and victory and tying the club to its city. Football Italia, in its 2018 anniversary piece, described the eagle on the badge as a reference to the Greek god Zeus. Either way, the bird gave the club two more nicknames, le Aquile, “the Eagles”, and gli Aquilotti, “the Young Eagles”.

The current badge, Wikipedia says, shows a golden eagle above a white shield with a blue border; inside the shield are the club’s name and a smaller tripartite shield in the club colours. The eagle also has a name of its own: Footy Headlines described it in 2022 as Olimpia.

Design and documentation.

Football club identities are often built from a handful of recurring devices, and the clubs in this part of the round show several of them. The first is the monogram: interlocking initials that compress a long formal name into a mark small enough for a shirt, a scarf or a stadium gate. Monograms tend to survive redesigns because supporters read them as a signature rather than a picture, so designers usually redraw the letters, adjust their weight and spacing, and leave the arrangement alone.

The second device is the motto. Some crests carry a short phrase, sometimes in the home language and sometimes in Latin, set on a ribbon or band. A motto gives a club a line of copy that can move from the badge to banners, stands and advertising without a change of meaning.

The third is origin. A number of European clubs began as works teams or sports associations attached to a factory, a school or a parish, and the founding organisation’s name or initials can remain in the club name long after the link has loosened. Finally there is the stadium name, which may honour a former president, a place or a sponsor, and which becomes part of the brand on tickets, signage and broadcast graphics.

Eagles, monograms and an anniversary crest.

Recent kits have used the eagle and the founding date as graphic material. Footy Headlines reported on 19 July 2022 that Mizuno had replaced Macron as Lazio’s kit supplier for the 2022–23 season, and that the new home shirt was classic sky blue with an embossed graphic of the eagle, Olimpia, repeated diagonally across the front.

The 125th anniversary brought back an older mark. nss sports reported on 9 January 2025 that, to celebrate the anniversary of its foundation, Lazio had released a commemorative kit carrying the club crest introduced in 1979, a stylised eagle with large wings, placed over the heart in blue. The back of the neck carried the inscription “9 gennaio 1900” together with the place name Piazza della Libertà, and the shirt added shoulder bands and cuffs in three shades of blue, with navy shorts and white socks.

The founding year has since become a pattern. nss sports reported on 2 July 2026 that Lazio and Mizuno had unveiled the 2026–27 home and third kits. The home shirt keeps the sky blue and white palette, adds a polo collar with a two-button closure, and is woven with an embossed SSL900 monogram, combining the club’s initials with the number 900 as a tribute to 1900; the motif also appears beneath the collar and on the front of the socks. The third shirt uses a deep navy base with geometric textures inspired by the mosaics and ancient pavements of Rome, finished with gold details.

For a design guide, Lazio shows how a club can carry two inheritances at once, Greek colours and a Roman eagle, and turn a founding date and a square in Rome into kit details. Compare it with AS Roma, the club with which it shares the Stadio Olimpico, and Napoli, another club whose sky blue has a story behind it. For this guide we use celeste sky, navy and eagle gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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