City Officials In Some Cases Get To Keep Defunct Sports Teams Brands [Video]

Once in a while, a city can put a championship trophy of a lost team in a museum.

In the fall of 1995, the owner of the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns franchise, Art Modell, decided to take his business from Cleveland to Baltimore which started a legal battle between the NFL and the city of Cleveland. The conflict would eventually be resolved with the city agreeing to build a new stadium for an NFL expansion team and the NFL agreeing to leave the team’s name, logo, colors and record book behind so that another team could take over the franchise’s history. Modell had to rebrand his football team and was hoping to call the team the Baltimore Colts but he could not get permission to do so. Robert Irsay took his Baltimore Colts franchise, complete with the team name, colors, logo and record book in the middle of the …