Super Bowl: Comparing the Lombardi Trophy to other iconic championship awards
The Super Bowl features one of the most iconic prizes in sports: the Vince Lombardi Trophy. It’s unique to its sport – American football – and very different from every other championship award for a variety of reasons.
But how does the Lombardi compare to the other major sports' hardware? We broke it, and four other trophies, down by size, value, material and effort to produce in this 3D augmented reality experience.
Click on each trophy below to reveal more information about it, and click through to see all five
The Vince Lombardi Trophy
The design for the trophy was originally created in 1966 by Oscar Riedner with a store-bought football and a cereal box as the base. He later sketched it on a napkin and showed it to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. The first trophy was awarded to Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers in 1967 but wasn't named after the Hall-of-Fame Packers coach until after his death in 1970 and presented as its now known in Super Bowl V.
The Commissioner’s Trophy
The Commissioner’s Trophy, award to the winner of MLB’s World Series, was originally designed by Balfour Jewelers in 1967. It was redesigned by Tiffany & Co. in 2000 and has been produced each year by them ever since. The lines on the baseball on the base of the trophy are latitude and longitude lines, symbolizing Major League Baseball’s global reach.
The Larry O’Brien Trophy
The NBA championship trophy is made each year by Tiffany & Co in Cumberland, Rhode Island. It was originally called the Walter A. Brown Trophy but was renamed the Larry O’Brien Trophy in 1984.
The Stanley Cup
The Stanley Cup is not recreated each year but is inscribed with the names of each player on the winning team at the end of each season. The trophy in circulation today is not the original Stanley Cup, which now sits in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. Once a band runs out of space for more inscriptions, it is removed and replaced with a new one. The old one goes to the Hall.
The FIFA World Cup Trophy
The FIFA World Cup Trophy is one of a kind, and by far the most valuable trophy on this list. It is awarded every four years to the winner of the FIFA World Cup, and the winning team's name is engraved on its underside. The winning team gets to keep a replica that is slightly smaller and gold-plated rather than solid gold, but the original trophy stays with FIFA after the initial celebration. It was designed by Stabilimento Artistico Bertoni in Italy.
