Tennis shoes from Montebelluna, 1973.

Lotto was founded in June 1973 in Montebelluna, a footwear town in the province of Treviso. Italian Wikipedia names the founders as three brothers, Giovanni, Sergio and Alberto Caberlotto, from one of the long-established families of the local shoe district, who later also owned the Treviso football club. A history of the brand published by Football Shirt Culture, archived in 2012, gives the same year and town, and the company’s own history page says Lotto was born in 1973 in the footwear district of Montebelluna.

The name comes from the family. Italian Wikipedia says the brand takes the closing part of the surname Caberlotto, while the opening part had already been used by the brothers for Caber, a maker of plastic ski boots that was later sold to the American company Spalding.

The range started with tennis shoes. Italian Wikipedia says tennis remained the company’s main business through the 1970s, and the archived Football Shirt Culture history says production began with tennis shoes, followed by models for basketball, volleyball, athletics and football, with sports clothing as the next step. In basketball, Italian Wikipedia records a sponsorship of Virtus Bologna, the Italian champions of 1979 and 1980.

Tennis players carried the name. The company names the Australian John Newcombe and Italy’s Tonino Zugarelli among the players who wore its shoes in the 1970s, and later lists Alberto Mancini, Thomas Muster and José Luis Clerc. Football Shirt Culture wrote that through its early years Lotto concentrated on the Italian market and on tennis footwear and clothing, signing players from the professional circuit, and it named Martina Navratilova, Boris Becker, Thomas Muster and Andrea Gaudenzi among them. In the 1990s, the company says, Muster won the French Open at Roland Garros wearing Lotto in 1995.

From court to pitch.

Football became a focus in the 1980s. Italian Wikipedia says the decade brought sponsorships with the goalkeeper Dino Zoff and with Ruud Gullit, and the start of a steadier flow of exports; in athletics, it adds, Lotto backed the Moroccan runner Saïd Aouita and the Italian shot-putter Alessandro Andrei, who won gold at the Los Angeles Games in 1984. The company’s own history dates its football boots to the same decade and names Carlo Ancelotti among the footballers it sponsored.

Kit deals followed. English Wikipedia lists AC Milan (1993–98) and Napoli (1994–97) in the 1990s and Juventus (2000–03) after them, along with Chievo and the Spanish club Real Zaragoza; Italian Wikipedia adds the national teams of Switzerland, Croatia and the Netherlands in the 1990s and the striker Luca Toni in the 2000s. In 2022, Italian Wikipedia says, Lotto returned to Serie A as kit sponsor of Monza, in the club’s debut season in the top division.

The company changed hands at the end of the 1990s. According to Italian Wikipedia, in June 1999 the business was taken over in a management buyout by a group of entrepreneurs from the sports trade led by Andrea Tomat, and renamed Lotto Sport Italia S.p.A.; English Wikipedia also dates the takeover to June 1999 and names Tomat as president and chief executive of the new company. Under Tomat, Italian Wikipedia says, the company concentrated on football and tennis, moved much of its shoe and clothing production to the Far East, set up a logistics hub in Hong Kong that served as a distribution centre, and invested in research.

Products from that period include the Zhero Gravity laceless football boot, which Italian Wikipedia dates to the 2006 World Cup, and the SynPulse tennis shoe of 2007. In 2007, Italian and English Wikipedia say, Lotto Sport Italia bought the American brand Etonic, which made shoes for running, golf and bowling.

Footwear district and brand.

A sportswear mark has to work at very small sizes and at a distance. On a shirt it usually sits on the chest, opposite a club crest or a national badge, and it has to read on a pitch, in a photograph and on a television screen as clearly as it does on a swing tag or a shoebox. That is why so many sportswear identities pair a compact symbol with a wordmark that can be dropped when space runs out.

Many brands also repeat the mark beyond the chest: as a tape running down the sleeve or the side seam, as a band of stripes or shapes on a cuff, or as a pattern woven into the fabric itself. On a team kit those placements share the shirt with the club’s own crest and with a sponsor’s name across the front, so the sportswear brand’s marks have to sit alongside other people’s identities without competing with them.

Each guide below looks at how one brand’s symbol, wordmark and repeated details have changed over time, who has owned the name, and what the documented record says about its history.

Two fields, one mark.

The company describes its mark as two playing surfaces. On its history page, Lotto says that from the beginning its name has been associated with a logo made of “a tennis field and a football field, superimposed,” and it later calls it the “double field” logo. English Wikipedia refers to the same device as the “double diamond.” The company says the two fields are connected by a passion for sport and by values it names as respect and fair play.

Ownership of the brand moved to the United States in 2021. On 18 August 2021 the Italian news agency ANSA reported that WHP Global, a group based in New York, had acquired the worldwide rights to the Lotto brand, announced in a joint statement with Lotto Sport Italia, then led by Tomat, and that Lotto Sport Italia would continue to manage the brand in the main markets of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. WHP Global has owned the Lotto brand since 2021 and lists it among its brands on its website, where it describes Lotto as blending a tennis and football heritage with sport and lifestyle.

Lotto Sport Italia is based at Trevignano, near Treviso, according to both English and Italian Wikipedia, and Italian Wikipedia lists the marks it holds as Lotto, Lotto Leggenda, Lotto Works and Mya. At the end of 2016, Italian Wikipedia says, the company announced an integration of several functions with Stonefly, a footwear company with which Tomat was also associated; the two remained separate as brands and as legal entities, with Lotto covering sport and fashion and Stonefly urban and comfort shoes.

For a design guide, Lotto shows a mark built from two playing fields and a name cut from a family surname. Compare Diadora, founded in the same province of Treviso, and Fila, another Italian-born sportswear name. For this guide we use court green, clay and ink with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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