colorr: color palettes for sports teams

Color palettes for 276 professional sports teams across 11 leagues, as named character vectors of hex colors and as ggplot2 colour and fill scales.

Coverage

soccer.colors() covers the Premier League (29), LaLiga (20), Serie A (20), the Bundesliga (18), Ligue 1 (18) and Major League Soccer (30).

Usage

library(colorr)

nba.colors("bucks")
#> Good Land Green Cream City Cream Great Lakes Blue            Black
#>      "#00471B"        "#EEE1C6"        "#0077C0"        "#000000"

soccer.colors("bayern_munich")
#>      Blue       Red
#> "#0066B2" "#DC052D"

Use colorr.leagues() and colorr.teams() to see what's available, and colorr.colors() when the league is itself a variable.

colorr.teams("wnba")
lengths(colorr.teams())
colorr.colors("nhl", "kraken")

ggplot2 scales

Every league has scale_colour_*(), scale_color_*() and scale_fill_*() constructors.

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(mtcars, aes(factor(cyl), mpg, fill = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  scale_fill_nba("bucks")

# continuous scales interpolate through the team's colors
ggplot(mtcars, aes(wt, mpg, colour = hp)) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  scale_colour_wnba("liberty", discrete = FALSE)

colorr.pal() returns the underlying palette function if you'd rather build the scale yourself.

pal <- colorr.pal("nfl", "lions")
pal(3)
pal(9)   # interpolated past the team's own colors

Older palettes

Every palette function takes legacy = TRUE, which returns the palette that shipped with colorr 1.0.1 rather than the current one, so figures made with older versions still reproduce.

epl.colors("man_united")
#>       Red    Yellow
#> "#DA291C" "#FBE122"

epl.colors("man_united", legacy = TRUE)
#>         Red      Yellow      Orange Dark Orange       Black
#>   "#D81A23"   "#F3CA07"   "#F4A614"   "#EF8221"   "#131313"

Teams that have been renamed since 1.0.1 still answer to their old names: mlb.colors("indians") returns the Guardians palette, and nfl.colors("redskins") returns the Commanders palette.

Installation

The latest stable version can be installed from CRAN.

install.packages("colorr")

The latest development version on GitHub can be installed using remotes.

if (!require("remotes")) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("lobsterbush/colorr")

Support or contact

Please use the issue tracker for problems, questions, or feature requests. If you would rather email, you can contact Charles Crabtree.

If you would like to contribute to the package, that is great! I welcome pull requests and new developers.

Tests

tests/testthat checks that every palette is a valid, deduplicated, named hex vector, that every team name from colorr 1.0.1 still resolves, and that the ggplot2 scales build.

devtools::test()

Credit

Some of the code from the functions comes from Karl W. Broman's broman::brocolors.

Team colors come mostly from Team Color Codes. Clubs that site hasn't caught up with, mostly those promoted into a top flight for 2026-27 and the newest expansion franchises, come from BrandColorCode, FootyLogos, encycolorpedia, Wikipedia's Module:Sports color, or the clubs' own brand assets. data-raw/provenance.json records the source for every team, and data-raw/README.md documents the pipeline.

Also, thanks to Hadley Wickham for his excellent book, R Packages.