The Pittsburgh Steelers were originally called the Pirates.
The Steelers Used to Be the Pirates
When Art Rooney paid $2,500 for an NFL franchise in 1933, he didn't call his team the Steelers. He called them the Pittsburgh Pirates—borrowing the name from the city's already-established baseball team.
It made sense at the time. Pittsburgh's baseball Pirates had been around since 1891, and the name had city recognition. Plus, sharing a nickname between sports teams was common in that era.
Seven Years of Losing
The problem wasn't the name—it was everything else. From 1933 to 1939, the Pirates were spectacularly bad. They cycled through five head coaches and racked up losing season after losing season. By the end of the decade, Rooney decided the team needed a fresh start.
In 1940, he partnered with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to run a public naming contest. The response was overwhelming: 3,000 entries poured in from fans across western Pennsylvania.
Why "Steelers" Won
Twenty-one people submitted the name "Steelers," but the credit went to Arnold Goldberg, a sportswriter from Uniontown who got his entry in first. Rooney loved it immediately.
The name honored Pittsburgh's identity as the heart of America's steel industry—a city built on blast furnaces, rolling mills, and blue-collar grit. It was tougher, grittier, and more distinctly Pittsburgh than Pirates ever was.
The team has been the Steelers ever since, with two brief exceptions during World War II when player shortages forced temporary mergers: the "Steagles" (Steelers-Eagles) in 1943 and "Card-Pitt" (Cardinals-Steelers) in 1944.
A Name That Stuck
Unlike the losing record of the Pirates era, the Steelers name proved to be a winner. The franchise eventually became one of the NFL's most successful dynasties, winning six Super Bowls and becoming synonymous with championship football.
But before the black and gold became legendary, they wore the hand-me-down name of a baseball team—and lost a lot of games doing it.