Top Templates: Adidas 'diamonds' (1), 1994/95

It's usually in the run-up to the start of a new domestic season that you'll hear them - the people bemoaning their favourite team's new kit. For some lucky fans, their club will be big enough to command a unique design, one that a major manufacturer will be only too happy to create for a team of great prestige and heritage. For almost everyone else, however, it's likely to be a template kit that's sported in the campaign ahead.

Kit templates have gained something of a negative reputation, a physical sign that a club can only afford an off-the-shelf design rather than an exclusive outfit by Adidas, Puma, Nike et al. This is perhaps unfair. Though it could be argued that some manufacturers should make more effort to create a wide range of designs, it's also true that some templates are good enough to demand the respect of those wearing the kit, be they players or fans.

That's where this occasional series aims to redress the balance, showing the versatility of a decent kit template while exploring the various permutations of styling and colour.

We start with a template many of you will have seen but only worn by one team, perhaps.

Germany's 1994 World Cup campaign has largely been forgotten about by many, truncated, as it was, due to a 2-1 quarter final defeat to Bulgaria. What's more readily brought to mind is the kit they were wearing, and specifically their shirt. After years of understated smartness and simplicity, the white shirts of the German national team for USA '94 exploded onto the scene with a diamond-filled surfeit of gaudiness in black, red and yellow - the colours of the German flag. It was, to coin a phrase, 'different'.

Many football kit aficionados used an alternative word - 'horrific.' What was once a by-word for effortless style had now become a challenge for those unwilling to embrace a new era in football kit design. Open-minded invention was how the mid-90's were panning out, and Germany's new kit aimed to prove it in no uncertain terms.

Even the green away shirt, not seen during the 1994 World Cup, used the same motif - to even greater howls of derision. Subtle it was not, yet it didn't stop other teams queueing up for something similar.

Elsewhere in the recently-expanded Europe, Georgia and Latvia were quick to adopt their own take on the Adidas diamonds. (By the way, has anyone else wondered why Adidas created a design founded on so many geometric shapes similar to that used by their rivals, Umbro, in their logo? Just us, then...)

Georgia's home kit, like Germany's, featured a white home shirt, but this time only two colours featured in those diamonds across the shoulders - red and black.

The same red/white/black colour scheme was applied to Germany's home shorts which had a diagonal cut-away across one leg. A peculiar feature and one which, as we'll see, was dispensed with by other teams wearing the same design. Georgia's socks, however, were different and featured the three broad Adidas stripes seen on other Adidas kits around the same time.

The away kit nicely transposed the colours to make red the predominant colour for the shirts and socks with the same black shorts.

Latvia's outfit was almost the reverse of Georgia's, red being the home colour, while the Latvian team badge was positioned in such a way as to overlap some of those diamonds. A little clumsy and unfortunate in the way it obscured the main design, it could be said.

Several European clubs also found a way to adapt the Adidas diamonds to their own effect too. In Hungary, BVSC Dreher of Budapest continued the often-used white theme, but chose blue and black as complementary colours.

In Israel. three top-flight teams had this template for their kit, of which Hapoel Haifa's home edition was virtually the same as Georgia's equivalent, and Maccabi Herzliya's was all yellow with blue and yellow diamonds on the shirt. Though evidence of these two outfits is difficult to find online, a third club, Bnei Yehuda, crop up on one or two YouTube videos wearing a very striking orange and black version. Here, as on a few of these Adidas kits, the diamonds do not have a speckled effect, as seen on the original Germany home shirt above, which doesn't unduly detract from the overall look.

The classic white-red-black combo came to the fore again in the form of FC Aarau's home kit for the 1994 and 1995 period, but arguably the best version of all was worn by Italian club Bari.

Using only a red and white palette, the club from Puglia looked fantastic both home and away, due in no small part to the absence of the wacky diamond cut-away on the shorts. In Bari's case, they chose plain white ones for the home kit and red ones for the change strip. Throw in a small flappy collar on the shirt instead of the regular tri-colour v-neck and you have a very nice couple of kits indeed.

Finally, as in Israel, three teams in the top division were wearing the above template, and once again it's difficult to know for sure how two of them looked due to the paucity of evidence. What is known is that Kocaelispor's shirt was white with black and green diamonds, accompanied by black shorts, while Petrolofisi's kit was virtually identical to Bari's, except the red diamonds continued onto their white shorts.

Besiktas, on the other hand, were rather more visible in their kit which, at home, had a white shirt and black speckled diamonds. Notable, here, is another different collar, this time a wrap-over v-neck in white and black which harked back to the mid-80's in all its neatness and simplicity.

The change strip was all red, but the black and white diamonds were retained, even including the white speckling effect from the home kit. And there was even a bonus for fans of collars as the away shirt had thin red and black piping along the inner edge of the broad white 'V'. More intricate in detail than the other collars, it nevertheless showed the flexibility of the design to be customised for any team that wore it.

It wouldn't be surprising to hear of other teams wearing those crazy diamonds of Adidas, and indeed if you know of any, please feel free to leave us a comment below with details. If possible, we'll try and add a graphic so that everyone can see what the other variations of the template looked like.

Got any favourite templates you'd like us to feature in future Top Template posts? Drop us a line and let us know!

-- Chris Oakley

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Merlin 1994 Premier League Sticker Collection

We regularly feature guest posts here on the Attic and today sees another, this time by the amiable William Abbs, creator of Saha From The Madding Crowd who takes a look Merlin's first Premier League sticker collections.

One lunchtime at school, a friend whose identity I've sadly forgotten gave me the playground equivalent of magic beans. They were just half a dozen football stickers that he said he had no need for, but they started off my very first collection and one that would grow into a complete set by the end of the 1993/94 season. I didn't quite understand the concept at first - idly swapping stickers with other friends without realising I was giving away players I would need to acquire again later - but I soon realised I'd been given the keys to a whole world of trading, bartering, and one-upmanship.

Once I found out there was a whole album's worth of stickers to get, I started buying them almost on a daily basis. Of course, my parents often bore the cost but my younger brother had agreed to come on board in the collecting so they were at least only funding one collection not two competing ones. I would also think nothing of blowing my weekly £2 pocket money on ten packets all in one go. 

Looking back, in relative terms I've never been so profligate with cash as I was during those months. Using my entire weekly income to indulge one obsession at a young age could have had unfortunate repercussions later on, so it's a relief really that football stickers proved to be a gateway to nothing harder than a regrettable dalliance with pogs a year or so later.

Although the Premier League was in its second year, this was actually the first edition of Merlin's sticker collection. The introduction on the first page - penned by Andy Gray, no less - wasted no time in aligning the two brands with the assertion that the album, like the Premier League itself, "breaks with tired, old conventions". That statement seems a lot more ominous now than it did twenty years ago, but that's probably because I was ten at the time so I just skipped straight to the player pages beyond it instead.

Arranged, conventionally enough, in alphabetical order, the twenty-two clubs that made up the Premier League that season were represented by a rather modest fifteen players each. There was also a team photo of every squad to collect as well as a fairly redundant action shot of the side's star player divided across two separate stickers (I lost count of how many copies of Neville Southall's outstretched right boot I had at one time). However, the crowning piece of every team section was obviously the picture of the club's badge on a reflective background. These were universally called "shinies" at my school yet erroneously referred to as "glitters" by those at a rival one, perhaps emphasising the class divide that exists between many Norwich suburbs.

Moving on to the pictures of the players themselves, what immediately becomes apparent is the general propensity of sensible haircuts and unironic moustaches that date the collection as much as the kits and the presence of Swindon and Oldham in the top division. It's also striking how old some of the younger players look, and indeed how old all of the older players look. Coventry's David Rennie, who was actually my final sticker in the collection, was only in his late twenties but already looked like he'd wandered into shot from a veterans' exhibition game taking place nearby. At Southampton, Peter Reid looked particularly grizzled even by his standards, giving him the appearance of Jack Regan working undercover as a veteran midfielder in a lost episode of The Sweeney.

For fans of kit design, an early nineties sticker album throws up a classic on almost every page. Norwich's speckled home shirt, famously worn the night they beat Bayern Munich at the Olympic Stadium earlier that season, is still revered very highly but I'd never noticed that the Canaries' yellow effort was based on a Ribero template also used for Coventry's sky blue version. Similarly, the chevron design on the front of West Ham's shirt (a personal favourite) was a Pony creation used to slightly less impressive effect at Southampton too. Laces around the shirt collar were a popular feature, favoured by Manchester United, Ipswich and Sheffield United. The award for the most daring away kit was a tie between Everton's salmon (it says here) and dark blue stripes and Manchester City's purple shirts with white pinstripes. Conveniently, all of the kits are reproduced as shinies towards the album's middle to be stared at in all their magnificence.

No doubt because of the heavy Sky presence throughout the rest of the collection, Merlin saw fit to include a double page spread on the channel's television coverage in the centre of the album. Entitled "Fabulous Footballing Facts About Sky", the section contained six stickers ranging in excitement from a Sky Sports logo that at least counted as a shiny to the mundanity of a cameraman standing pitchside. In another shot, Clive Allen - still on West Ham's books that season - is pictured sitting next to Richard Keys, who sports a jacket so yellow even the cast of Hi-de-Hi! would've dismissed it as garish. Stickers such as this, and the one of original Goals on Sunday presenters Anna Walker and John Solako posing for the camera, were obliged to be collected even if they were the football equivalent of the "Krusty Poses for Trading Card Photo" gag in The Simpsons.

The album ends on a rather poignant note, picking out eight players for its "Rising Stars" section. Some of those selected went on to enjoy respectable top flight careers but none of them became the superstars that the makers of the collection clearly thought they could be. Steve Froggatt, then a spritely winger at Aston Villa, eventually received an England call-up in 1999 while at Coventry, as did Norwich starlet Darren Eadie in 1997, but neither received a cap and both retired early due to injury. Chelsea youngster Neil Shipperley went on to play professionally until 2007 but never got further than seven U21 appearances. Southampton's Neal Bartlett and Manchester City's Adie Mike, however, had both dropped into Non League football within five years.

Looking back at the 1993/94 season through the medium of stickers offers an intriguing glimpse at the brief period between the formation of the Premier League and Euro 96 when the infiltration of television money and glamour hadn't quite taken full effect yet. Newcastle and Blackburn had both won promotion as a result of wealthy benefactors but Sir John Hall and Jack Walker remained examples of the traditional model in British football of the dominant businessman in the area taking control of his local club. The baggy indie fringes modelled by the likes of Manchester City's Garry Flitcroft and Sheffield Wednesday's Graham Hyde, meanwhile, come across as fairly budget concessions to style next to the sleeve tattoos and bejewelled earrings that would be flashed across our screens in later years.

Our thanks goes to William for this trip down memory lane. If you'd like to share any memories on football nostalgia, drop us a line at admin [at] thefootballattic [dot] com...

Read about another early Merlin sticker album - World Cup 90

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