[50GFSE] #23 - 1860 Munich 2012-13 'Oktoberfest' Shirt by Uhlsport

I am a sucker for limited edition shirts. Release a shirt with a crazy design, celebrating X number of years since your club first played on a Sunday or the anniversary of when they wore purple that time 63 years ago for some reason and I'm there, waving my cash like a hardened strip club patron.

That said, in recent years there have been so many limited edition shirts that not only is it impossible to buy them all, like some kind of kit pokemon, but too often the limited edition isn't much to write home about.

On the latter point, this delivers on all fronts!

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Released in 2012 (from what I can find out) this was the first of, to date, three Oktoberfest shirts released by the Munich club and is by far my favourite.

Based on the chequered blue and white flag of Bavaria (the Rautenflagge), the shirt is rendered in a gingham pattern all over, complete with a lovely retro lace up collar. The shorts and socks that went with this were brown and the combo of light blue and brown is, as far as The Football Attic is concerned, perfect.

The shirts that followed never quite lived up to the beauty or uniqueness of the original; the 2013 version having lime green trim and the 2014 one being a non-gingham version of the 2012 shirt.

Finally, as with all good limited edition shirts, this was actually worn in a match, during the club’s September 23rd league tie with Eintracht Braunschweig. Nothing worse than a limited edition shirt that's made purely for cash now...
 
Written by Rich Johnson (The Football Attic).

This shirt is part of The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever. The full list can be viewed here.

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[50GFSE] #24 - Crystal Palace 1972-73 Home Shirt by Admiral

I spoke once to a Charlton supporter who at the end of a mocking of their arch-rivals Crystal Palace concluded with ‘and they don’t even know what their home colours are!’

I'm not one to get involved with such club rivalry but I did think he had a point. Palace have changed their entire strip and colour scheme several times in the past 50 years with some, such as the Charlton fan mentioned earlier, considering this a hindrance... or at the least an identity crisis. One benefit of this colour indecision is that there has been a rich variety of different Palace kits over the years.

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Fans under 20 probably only know the club in red and blue stripes. Chaps of my age (40+) still have it in our heads that they play in white with a red and blue sash but if you’re any older, then its various combinations of claret and light blue that you will most associate with the Eagles - or as they were nicknamed in those days, The Glaziers.

The Palace kit that makes our countdown actually hails from the latter days of claret and light blue just prior to then boss Malcolm Allison’s complete rebranding of the club and the colour switch to red and blue.

After five years of either light blue with claret stripes or claret with light blue stripes in 1971, the club switched to a predominantly white kit with a claret and light blue vertical panel running down the centre, crafted of course in the style of the day, namely a long-sleeved crew neck shirt. A year later the design was refined to the one you see here, with the addition of a narrow white stripe separating the two colours and the addition of a new round modern badge.

It’s such a simple but strong and effective design, it's a mystery that, save for a few examples of the era (e.g. Chelsea away) this particular style of kit was not adopted by other clubs. In fact in many respects the dual vertical stripe approach could be seen as the forerunner of the ground-breaking sash design that appeared on the Manchester City change kits the following season, and of course famously at Palace a few years later.

Palace have worn so many great kits, but this one seems to neatly ease from one main colour scheme into another, therefore acting as a kind of ‘hybrid’. By 1973, though, the claret and light blue palette was discarded for good, except for a superb reinvention by Diadora in 2005 as a special ‘centenary kit’ (despite the fact that the club didn't actually wear it when they were founded!)

So whether you consider the club to sport claret and blue, red and blue or a be-sashed white, this particular strip deserves recognition as the one that bridged the gap between them all.


 
Written by John Devlin, founder and illustrator of TrueColoursFootballKits.com.

John can be found on Twitter and True Colours is also on Facebook.

This shirt is part of The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever. The full list can be viewed here.

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[50GFSE] #25 - Scotland 1988-91 Home Shirt by Umbro

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For me this beautiful shirt is one of the best Scotland jerseys of all time and was a massive departure from the designs that preceded it.

The shirt appeared on the cusp of the retro football influence that transformed a purely modernist approach to football fashion that occurred throughout the '80s. This Scotland shirt was first worn in May 1988 in a home international match against England and introduced an era of button down collars accompanied by a placket or opening in the neck. Button-down collars were to find their way on to virtually every Umbro shirt over the next three or four years and were rapidly copied by many other smaller sportswear brands at the time.

The placket on this shirt was unique however, in that it was VERY long and really brought to mind the old-fashioned shirts of the '40s and '50s. Plus, in a real stylistic triumph, it featured a subtle tartan design, the first time this most famous icons of Scottish visual identity had been included in a football kit. The tartan itself was a unique blend, specially designed for the Scottish Football Association. It was a brave move and perhaps one only made possible by the seismic shift in kit design thinking that occurred at the end of the '80s.

The rest of the shirt was full of delicate design elements that all contributed to making it a real classic. It was more generously cut than the previous Scottish jersey, therefore making it more appealing to replica-wearing Tartan Army foot soldiers and the fabric featured a subtle shadow pinstripe that added real class to the entire ensemble. Finally, two small Scottish Football Association icons were added, a Gothic monogram on the collar and a more complex design on the right sleeve.

Another aspect that is often ignored with this shirt, but one that I believe helps transcend it above the ordinary, was the inclusion of a yellow Umbro logo rather than the more familiar and predictable white version which complemented perfectly the new SFA crest. The new crest was sophisticated and flamboyant and replaced the albeit popular but rather bulky roundel badge that had been favoured for the past 20+ years.

All of these elements, small as they may be, were clearly highly considered by the Umbro team and really ushered in a new era of kit design.


 
Written by John Devlin, founder and illustrator of TrueColoursFootballKits.com.

John can be found on Twitter and True Colours is also on Facebook.

This shirt is part of The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever. The full list can be viewed here.

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[50GFSE] #26 - Internazionale 2010-11 Home Shirt by Nike

Kit design is as cyclical as mainstream fashion, if perhaps on a somewhat longer cycle. In recent years, this cycle seems to be ever decreasing with clubs having moved from releasing a new kit every few years to up to three every new season (plus the odd European edition for good measure). As the pace of change increases, so the time span between design phases shortens and as kit designers look ever more to the past for influence, so we see the period of influence change too.

One period that so far seems to have been largely ignored however, is the late '80s / early '90s. This was a time that saw designers no longer shackled by the limits of fabric technology and with it a host of insane ideas were released into the kit world. As with all fits of excess, it burned itself out in a refreshers coloured flame at Euro 96 and shirts once again settled into the land of collars and traditional colour schemes. Things soon began to swing further in the retro direction and the logical conclusion was reached with the ultra minimalist Tailored By Umbro range. But as is the way with design, once a point has been reached, the only way to go to be fresh is in the opposite direction and a few kits in recent years have hinted that perhaps it is time for the retro backlash to begin and maybe we'll begin to see a return to some of the more interesting ideas from the time.

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At first glance, this seems like just another standard Inter shirt. The requisite black and blue stripes, Pirelli sponsor, classic V neck, etc... But something isn't quite right and there’s something familiar about it, but I just can’t quite work out what. Then from a childhood memory, I see images of Peter Shilton picking the ball out of the net... a lot. And there it is: Inter's 2010-11 home shirt was a re-imagined version of England’s goalie kit from Euro 88. And I for one was happy with this.

For too long kits have been taking themselves too seriously. When this shirt was released, I had hoped it was heralding a new dawn in kit design and that perhaps we may once again experience some of the insanity those E filled days had brought. As with England at Euro 88, however, this was most certainly the falsest of dawns and the only real 'eccentric' design that followed was Warrior's Space Invaders / Horace Goes Skiing efforts with Liverpool.

Looking back, the design wasn't as one-dimensional, so easy to label as it first appeared. Yes, the stripes are clearly influenced by late '80s experimentation, but the overall look and feel of the shirt is actually one of clean lines and simplicity. There’s no unnecessary trim, the sleeve design doesn't vary from that of the main body, the sponsor’s logo is bold and clear and the V-neck is an understated wrap-over in plain black.

Stepping back and considering the shirt as a whole, it’s actually a great piece of design; A classic shirt that’s undeniably Inter, but with a hint of something else; an assertion that maybe some of those garish kits weren't actually all that bad and that it might well be time to reintegrate some of those ideas back into the world of kit design to create a new hybrid. Post modern, modernist cool.


 
Written by Rich Johnson (The Football Attic).

This shirt is part of The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever. The full list can be viewed here.

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[50GFSE] #27 - Coventry City 1987-89 Home Shirt by Hummel

It's often the case that when one inspects some of the most iconic designs in kit history, despite usually being remembered for one particular team (Holland '88 for example), they were actually just a standard template of the time, ultimately used by all and sundry. The aforementioned Netherlands shirt saw action not just on the backs of USSR and West German players, but also a host of German non-league sides.

The same applies to one of the other most sited classic designs, that of the Denmark '86 half-and-half shirt. While this doesn't seem to have been used for any other national teams, it certainly adorned a lot of club sides around Europe. Strangely though, it wasn't until a whole season later that that template would land on UK shores, and by that point it had been applied to Aston Villa (for both their home and away shirts), Southampton and this entry, Coventry City.

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It was asked in our first 50GFSE podcast whether having a national shirt template for your club felt somewhat demeaning and my immediate response was an overwhelming 'No!', citing this beauty as my prime example. Indeed, once Coventry had announced they were to be supplied by the Danish manufacturer, I hoped and hoped for a version of this template.

When I finally saw it, my hope turned to massive disappointment... it was dark blue!!! At the time, I attended the same school as George Curtis' son and one summer '87 evening, we were playing football on our local green. Up rocked Curtis Jr, wearing the new kit... and it was dark blue! Clearly this was not to be the final design as it was of course a sky blue version that the team finally ran out in come August.

There's not much to say about the design as it is an exact copy of the famous Denmark '86 one, but rendered in sky blue. The left side is alternating sky blue / darker sky blue stripes and the right is sky blue / white. The sleeves follow the reverse and the shoulders consist of the iconic Hummel chevrons all the way down.

So, why this version and not any other?  While I think the Villa version was brilliant, this one pips it as it's not only a beautiful shirt, but also my absolute favourite Sky Blue shirt of all time. More so, where other implementations seemed to be at odds with the club's usual designs (especially Villa's), for Coventry it actually perfectly combined the two themes the club seemed to alternate between: blue and white stripes and all sky blue shirts. Rather than create a kit that jarred with tradition, it remains the only CCFC shirt to actually fall in both camps.

Sadly, its seeming lack of commitment to either cause could be why it's usually regarded as one of the fans' least favourite shirts... or maybe the world just wasn't quite ready for such levels of wackiness. Ironic, given this was just before the insanity of the 1990's.

People... so fickle...


 
Written by Rich Johnson (The Football Attic).

This shirt is part of The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever. The full list can be viewed here.

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It's all about the money, money, money...

I awoke this morning (in Australia, before you ask) to the rather startling news that Raheem Sterling has signed for Manchester City from Liverpool for the princely sum of £49 million. Why I should be startled, I don't know, because ridiculous sums of money like this have been bandied around in the gutter press for some time now. Maybe it's just the reality of seeing that figure in real print right before my eyes:

£49 MILLION

Staggering, really - not least because if you think about it, Raheem Sterling is now worth the same as 49 Trevor Francis's. Imagine a big squad of 49 players, all of which are clones of Trevor Francis, all wearing the pale blue of Manchester City.

Strangely enough, Francis moved to Man City for £1.2 million in 1981, but that's to over-complicate a metaphor using Francis at the time of his landmark move to Nottingham Forest the year before.

So, Sterling = 49 x Trevor Francis, to use mathematical terms. If you think that's eye-popping, however, here's some other comparisons with record breaking transfers. Raheem Sterling is also worth the same as:

1.5 x Robinho (Real Madrid to Manchester City)
3.3 x Alan Shearer (Blackburn to Newcastle)
6.5 x Dennis Bergkamp (Internazionale to Arsenal)
15.3 x Ian Rush (Liverpool to Juventus)
21.3 x Mark Hughes (Man United to Barcelona)
98 x Kevin Keegan (Liverpool to Hamburg)
297 x Allan Clarke (Leicester to Leeds)
426 x Denis Law (Torino to Man United)

...and so it goes on. But to be fair to Sterling (and that's not a phrase you hear very often), he's not the first to have such comparisons made. If you think about it, when Trevor Francis moved from Birmingham to Nottingham Forest, he was worth the same as:

2 x Kevin Keegan (Liverpool to Hamburg)
5 x Martin Peters (West Ham to Tottenham)
10 x Denis Law (Man City to Torino)
50 x Tommy Lawton (Chelsea to Notts County)

...so it's all a matter of perspective.

Then again, we're missing the economical elephant in the room, namely inflation. How much money would Trevor Francis have been worth if his move to Nottingham Forest had taken place today? The answer: well over £4,500,000 - still well short of Raheem Sterling's signing-on fee.

Here's some other approximate inflation-adjusted landmark signings from down the years:

Len Shackleton (Newcastle to Sunderland, 1948) = £720,000
John Charles (Leeds to Juventus, 1957) = £1,500,000
Alan Ball (Arsenal to Everton, 1971) = £3,100,000
Bob Latchford (Birmingham to Everton, 1974) = £3,800,000
Bryan Robson (West Brom to Man United, 1981) = £5,800,000
Chris Waddle (Tottenham to Marseille, 1987) = £11,200,000
Andy Cole (Newcastle to Man United, 1995) = £12,500,000

So many numbers, so much to analyse... and yet we can still arrive at the same conclusion we had at the start - £49,000,000 is a hell of a lot of money. Obscene, as a matter of fact, though it pains me to say it.

Perhaps the owners of Man City should just buy Greece instead? They'd get more value for their money, and have the satisfaction of qualifying as an entire country for the next European Championships. Tune in next week for another world problem solved by 'yours truly' at The Football Attic.

-- Chris Oakley

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[50GFSE] #28 - Evian Thonon Gaillard 2011-12 Home Shirt by Kappa

Some football shirts have made this list by virtue of having a simple, but classic design, some by becoming memorable through exposure in a major tournament, while others have arrived here by being memorable purely by their distinct looks or features.

This entry in our Top 50 falls firmly in the last of those categories.

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As of next season, Evian TG - Évian Thonon Gaillard to give them their full name - will play in the French Ligue 2, having been relegated from the top flight at the end of 2014-15, but their story is a rather interesting one, having only formed 12 years ago. As such, they must surely rank as the newest club on this list.

They were originally called Football Croix-de-Savoie 74 as a result of a merger between FC Gaillard (who had actually been around since 1923) and FC Ville-la-Grand. In 2007, they merged with another team, Olympique Thonon-Chablais and subsequently, they became known as Olympique Croix-de-Savoie 74.

So where does the Evian part come into all this?

Well let's get the obvious out of the way... Yes, the Evian in the name IS the same as the brand of overpriced, bottled H2O. The owners of the club are the Danone Group, owner of the Evian brand and in 2009, the president of the Groupe Danone, Franck Riboud, was made honorary president. He then changed the name of the club to its current incarnation.

Enough of the history lesson... Why is this shirt on the list?  Just look at it!!!! OK, so it might require more justification that that...

Firstly, it's pink. Not enough football shirts are pink. Palermo fly the flag and look great doing so. Evian TG's shirts are something else and what makes them stand out is that Evian connection. Aside from the colour taken from the Evian corporate palette. right there on the front of the shirt, proud as anything, is the familiar Evian 'three mountains' logo. What I love about it is it doesn't just look like a mountain range... it also reminds me of several shark teeth, jutting jaggedly towards the players' necks.

So what else?  Most of Evian TG's shirts are pink and feature the mountains, so why this one? For me, what sets this apart is the fade effect on the pink, gradually turning to white at the bottom. Secondly, the blue trim. Pink can be hard to pair with another colour. The aforementioned Palermo successfully marry pink with black, adding an ominous air to what could be regarded as a predominantly feminine colour. ETG on the other hand, have opted for a vibrant blue, which seems to emphasise the boldness of the pink, rather than contrast with it.

The final reason this shirt makes the list can be summed up in one word - sponsors. Sorry, SPONSORS!!! For there are many... Given the whole shirt is in effect a walking Evian billboard, that doesn't mean other brands don't get a look in for the shirt is blessed with a further four company names writ large in various places. But it's the main sponsor that truly makes this shirt great. Those sharky mountains bathed in their corporate pink goodness. Water great combination. (Ahem...)

 
Written by Rich Johnson (The Football Attic).

This shirt is part of The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever. The full list can be viewed here.

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[50GFSE] #29 - West Ham United 1976-80 Home Shirt by Admiral

Somebody call Admiral. No, not the car insurance company. Somebody call the legendary football kit manufacturers of the same name. They're needed back in modern football where they used to be... BADLY.

Actually, they're needed back in modern football with all of the ingenuity, creativity and boldness they possessed back in the 1970's. Is that too much to ask? It's just that today's football kits often have an air of bland conformity, designed with one thing in mind - to offend as few people as possible. At least that's my view.

Admiral knew the time was right to shake British football out of its design coma four decades ago. What it brought to the table was a reinvention of the way football teams looked out on the pitch and the way fans looked away from the match.

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One miraculous example was the kit they provided for West Ham United at the start of the 1976-77 season, and the shirt that provided the most eye-catching element of it. In short, it featured chevrons; four thin claret-coloured v-shaped lines on a v-shaped light blue yolk covering the upper body. There's little anecdotal evidence as to the effect this new shirt created 39 years ago, but by all estimations, it must have been huge.

Like so many of Admiral's football shirt designs of the Seventies, this one had a distinction that had rarely been seen before. No other team had worn anything like it (the closest being a large 'V', perhaps), and few other teams wore the same template at the time. Only Sheffield United followed suit by adopting the Admiral chevrons between 1977 and 1979, and even then it was without the aid of the upper body panel in a contrasting colour.

With beautifully styled stripes on the cuffs and the fashionably large collar, this shirt dared to not only give West Ham their traditional light blue sleeves but also light blue on much of the shirt too. Such a change in balance in the use of club colours on a shirt can cause discontent among fans. It's happened on a number of occasions in recent years, but back in the late-1970's there were plenty of West Ham supporters that were only too pleased to see an injection of fashion livening up their team's kit. I count myself as one of them.

But let's go back to those chevrons. Pretty groovy, weren't they? And you may be wondering why they weren't seen more often back in the day. Well in many ways, they were - but not on the team shirts.

Instead, you'll have to look at some of the tracksuits Admiral were making for teams all those years ago. The evidence is there for all to see, whether it be at the 1976 FA Cup Final, Wales playing Yugoslavia in the same year, or just John Bond getting his official team photo taken at Carrow Road. Whatever the colour combinations, those chevrons looked sensational, but only West Ham wore them proudly on a regular basis out on the pitch.

And what was that opening line - "we need them back in modern football where they used to be"? Well beyond the radar of most people's awareness, Admiral are taking steps to do just that. Over in the United States, one team, the Charlotte Eagles, launched their new Admiral kit a few years ago, and it had a familiar look. There, in simplified form, were some chevrons in orange, white and black. Reworked for 2012, it proved that Admiral still had an eye for great design but hadn't forgotten their rich heritage.

Amen to that, and all power to them, say I.

Written by Chris Oakley (The Football Attic).

This shirt is part of The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever. The full list can be viewed here.

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[50GFSE] #30 - Saint-Étienne 1981-82 Home Shirt by Le Coq Sportif

The iconic French side Saint-Etienne (pronounced ‘center gen’ as we are reliably informed by our resident Frenchman, Jay) have had so many sublime kits over the years its difficult to pinpoint just one to be elevated to greatness. The 70's classic with tricolore trim is just one example of how ‘Les Verts’ dominated French football fashion at the time. But for me the 1980-84 Le Coq Sportif long-sleeved home shirt is truly an item of apparel to be marvelled at.

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It's a jersey that is as confident, bold and stylish as the team that wore it (which of course included a young Michel Platini who helped the side clinch the 1980-81 Ligue 1 crown). You may remember the French 1980-84 adidas home shirt that made it into our countdown last week? This shirt is a close relative and features a similar collar/white insert panel combo; the white insert standing out like a beacon amidst a field of green. This shirt also features pinstripes, but in a sartorial statement that took us in England a good couple of years to catch up on, they were placed horizontally! And in pairs! And they continued on the collar! Incroyable!

As if that wasn't good enough the logo of club sponsors ‘Super Tele’ (a French pop/TV magazine) is frankly enormous and plastered over the shirt in an example of blatant and arrogant commercialism. To some it may be ugly, to me, its beautiful! France embraced the common sense of sponsorship early on and in fact, all French sponsors’ logos at the time were huge including that of KB Jardin who took over the shirt deal from Super Tele in 1981 and continued on this jersey until it was mothballed at the end of the 1983-84 season.

From a retro perspective there’s something about a massive ‘in your face’ sponsors logo that is inherently cool - and the fact that in this instance it's on arguably the coolest shirt of the coolest team in France is perfectly fitting.

Written by John Devlin, founder and illustrator of TrueColoursFootballKits.com.

John can be found on Twitter and True Colours is also on Facebook.

This shirt is part of The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever. The full list can be viewed here.

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The Football Attic Podcast 25 - 50GFSE 40-31

It's time for the second podcast in the Greatest Football Shirts Ever series and today we're covering shirts 40-31!

Prepare for nearly 2 (two) hours of kitchat, which is a bit like a KitKat, but with 40 fingers...er...

So grab a beer or a horlicks and settle in for nerd nirvana! Booyakasha!

Subscribe to The Football Attic Podcast on iTunes or download our podcast here.

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