[50GFSE] #18 - Aberdeen 1976-79 Home Shirt by Admiral

You know, the more I study football kit history the more I appreciate just how big and far-reaching the effects of the Admiral mid-70's kit revolution were. The kit they produced for Aberdeen back then, worn just as the club were beginning a golden era under the managerial reign of a certain Alex Ferguson, is a fine example.

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Prior to 1976, The Dons had enjoyed a succession of relatively plain and simple red kits. Nothing wrong with that of course, but Admiral’s bold approach, born from a need to produce copyrightable designs that could be subsequently sold as replicas and inspired by the ever increasing role of colour TV in the football world, lifted the ordinary Aberdeen kit into something extraordinary.

It was the simple addition of five (or occasionally four as, in true Admiral fashion, the finer details did vary) thin vertical stripes all grouped together on the left hand side that really made the kit stand out. The fact that these stripes then continued on the shorts raised its kudos even higher.

And that was it. That was all the kit required. No concepts, no symbolism - just the beauty of pure aesthetics. Hell, it was so good, it didn't even need a club badge! But whether it was being worn in a football stadium or the local rec, it was unmistakably Aberdeen, no doubt about that.

A few other clubs also sported this design but none of them wore it quite as well as The Dons and is fondly remembered by Aberdeen fans of a certain age.

The fact it was donned (ahem) in a couple of vital and formative cup finals en route to Fergie’s prime at Pittodrie seems only 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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[50GFSE] #19 - Argentina 1986 Home Shirt by Le Coq Sportif

Just after the 1986 World Cup had finished, I purchased my first ever Shoot! magazine with a World Cup review in it. On the front cover was Maradona cradling the World Cup trophy, wearing the gorgeous blue and white striped shirt that would beguile me to this day.

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The two things (and this demonstrates how incredibly obsessive I am about this stuff) that hooked me were the fact the central stripe was white and not blue - a rarity for Argentina - and that it was made from an Airtex material. Yes. I really do love a shirt due to the inclusion of holes.

In addition to the holes, it just looked gorgeous in the Mexico sun, especially when contrasting with their black shorts and white socks.  It also never looked better than in the Final against a West Germany team in their vibrant green shirts.

The shirt itself is a very simple affair, being nothing other than white- and blue-striped Airtex material with a standard round neck, but to me that's part of its appeal. I don't think a shirt would be made like this any more. Yes, we've had the whole retro-looking 'Tailored By' range from Umbro, but aside from those (and even then there were few striped shirts where the sleeves were just the same exact style as the body), you just don't get shirts where the sleeves just continue the main style with no additions or changes in style whatsoever.

To me, this shirt is proof that at times, a design doesn't have to be anything other than what it needs to be, while still being unique. Though it may be simple in nature, the change of central stripe to white and the Airtex material raise this from plain shirt to design classic.


 
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] #20 - Olympique Lyonnais 2010-11 Away Shirt by adidas

As with the previously mentioned Marseille shirt, this was from the period where adidas were providing French teams with what some regard as strikingly unique and extravagant designs and other, less educated/cultured folk regard as abominations. I am clearly in the former camp, hence this shirt's initial nomination and, due to the others on this project being of a similar ilk (though not cultured enough to appreciate the aforementioned Marseille shirt), subsequent inclusion in the chart.

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Flouncing in in a deep burgundy, the front is adorned with what appears to be a pattern inspired by a Las Vegas casino carpet and given all the trim is in gold, one could be forgiven for thinking the whole ensemble was conceived somewhere on the Strip.

And this is where that difference of opinion come in. While some think the result is gaudy, tacky or just plain awful, I, and my esteemed colleagues, all deem this to be a masterpiece of design and style.

The print is a triumph of gorgeously indulgent, swirling symmetricality (yeah I know the word is symmetry, but that doesn't sound half as good!) in a darker burgundy than the rest of the shirt. From a distance, it resembles a Rorschach ink blot test, which makes you wonder what the designer saw when he looked at his creation... Maybe his mother scolding him for not having a sensible job... and why isn't he wearing a coat, it's cold outside, you'll catch your death Martin!!!!

Again, similarly to the Marseille shirt, the trim is all gold and while some say it jarred against the blue, here it just adds to the luxury feel (or the tackiness, if you're a berk).

One final detail is something that only those who purchased a certain version of the replica shirt would have seen. The numbers on the back, as well as being available in boring old block fonts, were also available inset with the same pattern as on the front of the shirt, but in gold. Damn that's some good detailing right there!



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] #21 - Universitario 2013 88th Anniversary Shirt by Umbro

And so we come to another limited edition shirt on this list (yet again nominated by me), though this one encountered very little resistance due to its staggering beauty.

Released to celebrate Peruvian club Universitario's 88th year (oh come on, since when has that been any kind of event?), Umbro stripped things right back and went full-on retro.

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Despite being a very minimal design, there are several features that make this shirt great. Firstly, the whole thing is constructed from Umbro's lush cotton used on so many of their 'Tailored By' range.

And then there's the details. Starting from the top, we find a neat, trimmed collar which then has a neck opening that extends almost all the way down to the abdomen; a brave move given how most manufacturers still try to keep their tribute shirts within the bounds of modern features.

The club crest - a gorgeously simple U in a circle and rendered in maroon - is quite thick, luxuriously stitched on and again, really feels like it would have done in days gone by.

The Umbro logo, rather than going with just the diamond (as they did for most of their 'Tailored By' range), has the company name underneath, akin to their '80s logo - a strange choice given the look they're clearly going for. Similarly, along the shoulders at the back of the shirt, is a maroon line extending from the neck, a superfluous detail that looks somewhat modern and therefore out of place. It's all very well going for a mix of modern and retro (a la Corinthians), but this only works when the shirt doesn't have its foot so heavily planted in one camp to begin with.

Thankfully, these details don't detract too much from the overall look and to further enhance the shirt, the numbers are stitched on in contrasting thread. Finally, the sleeves are trimmed in thick cuffs and it's these details that truly make this shirt the work of art it is.


 
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] #22 - Dundee United 1984-87 Home Shirt by adidas

As is clearly evident by a quick scan through our the preceding entries in our 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever series, adidas were enjoying a golden era during the 1980s and seemingly could do no wrong. This rich vein of kit design form continued north of the border with their 1985-87 kits for Dundee United that are splendid examples of the quality of their strips during this period.

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Adidas had been residents in the kit room at Tannadice since 1977 and this, their third home kit for the Arabs is arguably their best with so much to admire within it.

Much to the excitement of kit nerds at the time (well, me anyway) the shirt featured dynamic DIAGONAL shadow stripes - a new development in this most stylishly subtle way to decorate a shirt. The trend for including a third hue to kit trim in the mid-80s suited the club’s tangerine and black colour scheme a treat with the newly introduced white adding a whole new level of sophistication to the ensemble.

The shirt is also notable for the inclusion of the rather smart and angular logo of supermarket/convenience store chain VG, the side’s first ever sponsor. VG's parent company included future United chairman Eddie Thompson as part of their managerial board and it was Thompson himself who engineered the deal with the club. Interestingly the VG logo on replica jerseys was much smaller than the ones on the players’ versions.

Adidas obsessives will note the truncated three-stripe trim (yes, this was back in the days when adidas did something different for a change with their most famous branding adornment!) that stopped neatly at the shoulder in a similar style to that also sported by Liverpool at the time. The epaulette-like rendering of the three stripes seemed to give the shirt extra gravitas and strength which suited perfectly a very impressive Dundee United side who, at the time, were enjoying their own golden era and rampaging through Europe in the UEFA Cup whilst wearing this kit.

In fact this strip’s last outing was against Gothenberg in the second leg of the 1987 UEFA Cup Final where sadly a 1-1 draw was not enough to avoid an aggregate defeat to the Swedish side (although to give credit where credit’s due, United had already knocked out Barcelona earlier in the tournament).

For me, this kit is another superb example of a great outfit accompanying (and possibly inspiring?) a great team - and you must remember that in the mid-80s Jim McLean’s side were pushing the Old Firm all the way for domestic honours... which was given extra spice by the notion of the logo of a pretty small Scottish convenience store appearing in some of the biggest stadiums in Europe!


 
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] #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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