The history of sports, at a glance
I've loved sports since I was a kid. Not just the games: the numbers, the history, the team colors. I wanted to see all of it at once, every season, every upset, every dynasty, and where my teams sat inside it.
Regular brackets can't do that. They sprawl left to right, they waste the middle, and a 64-team field turns into a wall chart. So during the 2010 World Cup I tried bending one into a circle. The champion goes in the center. Each round becomes a ring around it. Every team is an arc in its own color, and the whole tournament, every match and every score, resolves into a single mark you can read from across a room.
It came out almost fully formed. I printed 500 copies on a Kickstarter that funded in a month, and the poster ended up in more than a hundred publications, on the front page of the Berliner Morgenpost, and in exhibitions at the Cité du Design in Saint-Étienne and MuVIM in Valencia.
Then it became an obsession. If the form worked for one tournament, it would work for all of them.
Every season, drawn the same way
Champs Ring now includes over 1,500 unique prints, spanning 29 leagues and tournaments across six sports, and representing 1,470 championship seasons, from the 1872 FA Cup to the 2026 World Cup. Every print uses the same sunburst bracket to represent elimination rounds using team colors and codes to guide you through. You can watch the NCAA field grow from eight teams to sixty-four, a ring sprouting at a time. You can see a franchise's whole legacy as a color that keeps coming back to the center.
No logos. No sponsors. No stat boxes. Just codes, colors, scores, to help you unlock the memory of your team's epic run to the center of the ring.
As far as I can tell, nobody had drawn a sports tournament this way before. In 1921 the first sunburst diagrams were published. By June 2010 they were old news in information design, yet there was still no radial bracket to point to. When the poster went up on Subtraction, the question in the comments was whether anything else like it existed. Since then the format has gone everywhere: NCAA radial brackets, circular-bracket generators, forecast wheels, and a steady supply of round bracket prints. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but when you buy a fine-quality, archival Champs Ring print here, you're buying the original.
Rebuilt for 2026
For the relaunch I rebuilt the entire library from the ground up. Every team's color is matched to its brand in each era, so a team looks the same on every poster from the same years and changes when its brand did. Round names were re-researched league by league and decade by decade, so a 1977 legend reads the way 1977 read. Type on the bottom half of every ring was reset so it never reads upside down. And the seasons that piled up while the shop was quiet are all here, along with whole new histories for more leagues.
Designed in Brooklyn by Hyperakt's Deroy Peraza.
The prints
Every bracket is drawn as vector art and printed to order on museum-quality, off-white archival matte paper, in 18 × 24 and 24 × 36 inches, in a white and a black edition. Framed prints come in three frames: black, white or pine.
The Story of Champs Ring
Sports were my way into design, and it started with one logo. The first one I fell in love with was the Montreal Expos'. At first glance it's a big M, for Montréal. Look again and there's a red e for Expos and a blue b for baseball hidden inside it. It felt different from every other logo in baseball, and it grabbed me. Suddenly the whole world of team logos and sports brands was fascinating, and I collected all of it, in trading cards and in gear.
The other thing that pulled me in was the back of the card. All those stats, season after season, were there to analyze and work through, and together they told the story of how great a player was, or wasn't, and when it turned. That's where my love for telling stories with data comes from.
At the age of 10, I was filling binders with team logo drawings. I loved the Heat's basketball on fire, the Nuggets rainbow skyline, the Chargers thunderbolt, and so many other clever marks.
Since 1988 my parents ran a typesetting workshop out of our Miami “Florida” room. Linotype computers and light tables filled the space. In the late ’80s they bought an Apple Macintosh SE/30 and Aldus FreeHand 1.0. Twelve-year-old me saw this as the perfect opportunity to take my hand-drawn sports logos to the next level. I obsessively began recreating all of them with digital type, working hard to find the fonts that were the closest match for each wordmark and learning the effects I needed to imitate the real logos. I stretched, outlined, and drop shadowed to my heart’s content. Without realizing it, this was my first lesson in typography.
Champs Ring is just a continuation of a childhood obsession. It started by trying to make young me proud. Now, it continues to make the next generation proud.
The Next Generation
I made the first Champs Ring in 2010, two years before my son Luco was born. He has grown up in the stands with me, from Argentina vs. Brazil at MetLife when he was a few months old to the 2026 World Cup on the same field. Today our shared love of sports makes us the perfect team to bring Champs Ring back to life.
Deroy Peraza
Deroy is the creator of Champs Ring, having drawn the first ring during the 2010 World Cup. He is a co-founder, partner and creative director at Hyperakt, a Brooklyn-based branding agency for purpose-driven organizations.
Luco Peraza
Luco inherited his dad's obsessive love of sports. He is an MLS NEXT Academy soccer player for Brooklyn United. He runs Champs Ring on Instagram, picks the moments worth sharing, and keeps track of which finals deserve a print next.
2012 · Argentina vs. BrazilMetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, NJMessi hat trick, the winner a long-range strike in the 85th minute. Argentina 4–3, with two red cards in stoppage time.
2014 · USA vs. TurkeyRed Bull Arena, Harrison, NJFabian Johnson and Clint Dempsey score in the World Cup send-off. A Turkey penalty in the 90th makes it 2–1 and nervy.
2016 · Marlins FanFestMarlins Park, Miami, FLBarry Bonds’ first spring as hitting coach. Ichiro got his 3,000th hit that August.
2017 · Ballpark visitFenway Park, Boston, MAThe Sox were in Philadelphia, so we had Fenway, the oldest active stadium in MLB, built in 1912, to ourselves.
2017 · Barcelona open trainingHard Rock Stadium, Miami Gardens, FL27,000 came to watch practice. The next night Barça beat Real Madrid 3–2 in the first Clásico on U.S. soil, Neymar’s last game for the club.
2018 · Barcelona vs. Boca JuniorsCamp Nou, Barcelona, SpainMessi, newly named captain, chips the keeper. Riqui Puig debuts at Camp Nou. Barça 3–0 for the Gamper Trophy.
2018 · USA vs. BrazilMetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, NJFirmino early, then Neymar from the spot for his 58th goal for Brazil. Brazil 2–0.
2023 · Slavia Praha vs. BohemiansEden Arena, Prague, CzechiaCup semifinal. Bohemians lead 2–1 in the 96th minute, Lingr heads in the equalizer, Jurečka wins it 3–2 for Slavia in extra time. The crowd goes wild.
2023 · Barcelona vs. TottenhamEstadi Olímpic, Barcelona, SpainDown 2–1 late, Barça send on 16-year-old Lamine Yamal. He takes over, and Barça score three to win 4–2. The world meets Lamine.
2024 · USA vs. Japan, OlympicsParc des Princes, Paris, FranceWomen’s quarterfinal. Scoreless for 105 minutes, until Trinity Rodman cuts inside and curls one into the top corner in extra time. USA 1–0.
2024 · Partizani vs. VllazniaArena e Demave, Tirana, AlbaniaSeason opener and Tirana’s big clash. Vllaznia steal a 1–0 win on the road.
2024 · NYCFC vs. Inter MiamiYankee Stadium, Bronx, NYMessi and Suárez up front, Miami ahead 1–0. James Sands equalizes in the 95th minute.
2025 · Union vs. NYCFCSubaru Park, Chester, PAPlayoff upset. Maxi Moralez, 38, scores the only goal to knock out the Supporters’ Shield winners.
2025 · Jets vs. DolphinsMetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, NJDolphins 34–10. Tua stays unbeaten against the Jets, and Zach Wilson comes back to MetLife in Miami colors.
2026 · Norway vs. Senegal, World CupMetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, NJHaaland scores twice, Sarr pulls one back in stoppage time. Norway hold on 3–2 to reach the knockouts.
