The first football matches In
England were played before there was any regulation football
kit. Cricket whites, formal shirts, and flannelette jumpers
were all pressed into service. Some clubs adopted old school colours and
shirts, while others used caps scarves and sashes to distinguish
teams. This is the journey from then to now: the history of
football kit. With the advent of professional football in the 1880s,
clubs started ordering cheap uniform kits. Heavy cotton, collared
shirts with buttons or laces at the neck, in a few standard designs. When
the football league was founded in 1888 three clubs opted for plain
shirts:
Accrington (red), Bolton
Wanderers and Preston North End (both White).Five went with quarters,
which look like halves but are made of four panels
of material. They were Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Derby, Everton, and
Notts County. And four chose vertical stripes: Burnley, Stoke,
West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. In the opening game of
the 1890-91 season Wolves travelled to newly admitted
Sunderland and both sides took the field in red and white stripe
shirts. The referee made Wolves change into their white
dress shirts and the Football League then required all strips to be
registered and all clubs to have a white change strip in case of a colour
clash. Wolverhampton switched to the now familiar gold and
black and began the 1892 season with an unusual shirt of
diagonal halves.
Over the next decade the expanding
league would feature most of the standard kit designs we see
today. Hoops at Bradford Park Avenue, QPR and Reading. Sleeves at
Derby County, Burnley and Aston Villa. The deep-V at Clapton,
Leeds United and Birmingham City, while, down in the west country,
Bristol Rovers chose actual quarters (requiring eight panels of
material).Few English clubs adopted the sash or the single big
stripe, which were taken up with much more enthusiasm in Latin
America…
….and sadly the polka dot jerseys
worn by Bolton Wanderers in 1884 and 1886 did not see a revival. Whatever
the format of the shirt, no one was allowed to play in black, which had
been reserved for officials alone, although for much of this
era they would wear a tailored jacket or blazer rather than a
shirt.
This restriction was lifted in England
in 1992, when the Premier League allowed referees to wear
green. At the 1994 World Cup FiFA’s officials went with
black, yellow or burgundy and, since then, referees have gone
on a chromatic odyssey through the full range of blues, pinks,
yellows and greens. At the turn of the century goalkeepers wore the same
colour shirts as their teammates, distinguished themselves by
sporting a cap. Even so, it was difficult to call handballs in
the penalty area so, in 1909, the Football Association rewrote the
rules, requiring goalkeepers to wear a shirt in a colour.
Initially they could choose from red, white or blue. Then green was
added, which quickly became the colour of choice for the mid-century
keeper. Shirt numbers were sighted in Australian soccer before the First
World War, and the American Soccer League in the early
1920s, and then in England in 1928 in a game between Arsenal
and Sheffield Wednesday. The experiment was repeated at the 1933 FA Cup
final, with Everton players wearing numbers 1-11, and
Manchester City wearing 12-22. FIFA introduced
standard 1-11 numbers at the 1938
World Cup and made them compulsory thereafter.
In the post-war era, the British manufacturer
Umbro was the first to experiment with new synthetic materials,
producing a shiny reflective shirt for Bolton’s appearance
in the 1953 Cup Final. But the most
important innovations were coming from elsewhere. Adapting to the warmer
conditions, and more stylish fashion cultures, Italian and
South American manufacturers were using lighter cottons.
They also abandoned
buttons and collars, offering short sleeves, and smarter fitted
cuts. See this Juventus kit from 1950.Trendsetters included the cherry
red shirts of the great Hungarian teams of the early
1950s, and the all-white of Real Madrid in the late
1950s, showing off the new tailoring across Europe with
their v-necks and tight cuffs. Umbro would take note and both the England
and the West Germans shirts worn at 1966 World Cup final are
models of round necked, understated cool. Perhaps the boldest design move
of all came from Brazil who ditched the all-white in which
they lost the 1950 World Cup, and after a national competition opted
for the yellow shirt, green trim, blue shorts strip that has come to
define the nation. In the 1970s and 1980s shirts changed to reflect the
new commercialism with the arrival of sponsors logos.
Eintracht Braunschweig first wore
the Jägermeister logo on their shirts in 1973. In
England, non-league Kettering Town, put Kettering Tyres
on their strip in 1976 which the FA then banned. But by 1978 the battle
was lost and all of the leading clubs followed suit.
Cotton began to give way to
polyester, and new techniques for printing and weaving kits were
developed. Admiral’s 1980 England kit, for example, was amongst the
first to have blocks of colour printed onto the shirt, although
West Germany’s late 1980s’s geometric tricolour ribbon defined
the genre and the Netherlands’ triangles and rhombus tile print,
which debuted at Euro 88, began a long, and gruesome
trend for over complex weaves and garishness.For the first time, football kits
and street fashion began to cross over. Not yet a huge
market, replica kits began to be worn inside and outside the stadium.And
it would become very big business. Bayern München sold more than three
million shirts in 2021 and the top ten clubs in the world have
shifted more than 20 million between them. They have also become
more cluttered: Now, every shirt has a squad number and a
player’s name on the back. Kit manufacturer’s logos,
first introduced in the 1980s, are everywhere and clubs,
have added and refined their branded crests. Sleeve patches have been added,
providing branding for the tournament being played, or sold
as additional adverting space. And in some leagues the back of
the shirt accommodates sponsors, too.
More recently the biggest changes in
football shirts have come from the use of new and
advanced materials. Shirts are ever lighter. In 2021, Italy
played in a Puma shirt that weighed just 72 grams. Material with a
higher tensile strength has also been developed to stop shirts ripping and
special panels can be added to the shirt to compress and protect certain
muscles. While hydrophobic material next to the skin conduct
sweat away and onto the shirts surface where it can rapidly
evaporate.
All of which are made of oil and plastic with a huge carbon footprint, so the future are the low carbon shirts made for Forest Green Rovers from bamboo and coffee grounds and Real Madrids’ upcycled plastic kits.It’s been quite a journey since the days of formal shirts and cricket whites.
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