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Your Top 10 Football Kits

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1. Netherlands 1978. Deep orange, black trimming, round collar and the trefoil. And that shine! No strip had reflected light like that before, and few have since. Apart from anything else, it was a major contribution to pedestrian safety. No one got run over by a car at night while wearing that kit. As worn by Ruud Krol and Johnny Rep. And how.
2. Boca Juniors. One of football’s most distinctive kits and maybe its most bullet-proof. There has never been a bad Boca shirt.
3. Inter Milan. Like Boca, the Nerazzurri never change their kit that much. And why should they? After all, those black and blue stripes are so slimming.
4. Flamengo. Black and red hoops. As worn by Zico, Junior and Dennis the Menace.
5. Torino 1949. The elegant and classic granata strip of the grande Torino team of the late 40s had the scudetto on it so often you’d think it was the club badge.
6. West Bromwich Albion 1979. We need something from the UK so let’s go with WBA 1979. Like the Dutch kit, it benefits from the halo effect caused by being worn by cool players (you almost certainly are thinking about Cyrille Regis right now aren’t you?). Great change kit too. The UK’s last great cotton football kit.
7. Cameroon. A splash of colour that is welcome at any World Cup, even if we usually only get to see it for three games. Anyone who tries to win the African Nations Cup on FIFA or PES does it as Cameroon. The 1994 vintage was probably the best looking one.
8. Uruguay. It’s a colour scheme that shouldn’t work really, but somehow does. It also seems to have transformative powers, enabling a country with 3 million people to win two World Cups.
9. Tampa Bay Rowdies. The NASL was a cavalcade of strip madness, with the Colorado Caribous tasseled strip being the most notorious offender. We’re going to go with the Rowdies, though. Probably the most rock & roll kit there’s been.
10. Pescara 2020. One of the happier football stories of 2020 was Italian Serie B team Pescara launching a competition during the country’s lockdown for children to design their kit for next season. It was won by six year-old Luigi D’Agostino and is a thing of beauty.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52368010

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Comments

  1. The Wales kit of the late 70s made by Admiral. Red shorts, red top, with two symmetrical yellow and green stripes running vertically from the shorts to the shoulders. Quintessentially retro, even for the late 70s, Brian Flynn looked great in it it. Admiral did similarly styled kits for Coventry City and Eintracht Frankfurt, but the Wales kit was the one.

  3. Mine are all Manchester City:
    1956 FA Cup Final – maroon with white pin stripes
    1969 FA Cup Final – red & black stripes as per Milan
    1972 home – sky blue, round neck, badge central
    1988 or so away – maroon & white stripes
    1990 or so away – maroon

    • Ah now that is pretty cool. I would have gone with black socks though. That’s two innovative away kits from Coventry on this thread. Must be the Jimmy Hill factor.

    • Ooh, I dunno. Les Bradd had something of the Mario Kempes about him when he scored a hat-trick in the last 6 or 7 minutes at Oakwell, when Stockport came back from 4-1 down to draw 4-4 with Barnsley. That game, along with the one where we let a 3-0 lead over Ipswich slip in the last 4 minutes to draw 3-3 is why us Barnsley fans are never confident we’ve got a winning lead until we’re back in the pub after the whistle’s been blown.

        • Yes, I thought you would have enjoyed that one!

          I hadn’t gone up for that game, as I was living in London at the time, in nursing accommodation. I was, ahem, entertaining a theatre nurse that afternoon who was from Bury St. Edmonds and whose family were all Ipswich fans. I had the Ceefax on the TV, keeping a discreet eye on the score, and turned it off when the full-time whistles were going, happy that we’d won 3-0. The young lady went down to her room to get ready, as we were heading down to Camden, so I put Final Score on. When our result came up as 3-3 I laughed, as they had clearly made a typo. So I checked Ceefax and, sure enough, we’d buggered it up in the last few minutes. In fact, didn’t you hit the bar at 3-3?

          Anyway, when I wandered down to knock on this lass’s door on the way out she was on the phone. She looked at me with a big grin and handed me the phone, as her cousin wanted a word with me. He was sat on the coach on his way home from the game, and was somewhat cheeky, if I may say so!

          • Fantastic! That’s why we live footie, memories like that. Though obvs I wouldn’t be so charitable if the boot was on the other foot so to speak.

            Edith…I mean, the memories wouldn’t have been so happy!

            • Ipswich have had a habit of spoiling my day over the years. Weren’t we 2-0 up live on TV a few years ago, before you scored 4 or 5? I was back in the pub by the time the whistle went.

              And then there’s Wembley… We were never in that game, apart from the first few minutes, but if Wright hadn’t made the wonder save from Hristov’s header I think we’d have beat you.

              • Sorry about that. The 3-5 victory I’d forgotten about!

                The playoff final though. Great game . It was really our second half performance that did for you though , as you say, you would have had momentum if that header had gone in.

                I had to get off the bus to work the next morning twice I felt so bad! Pickled eggs and pints of bitter in the Lass o Gowrie.

                To cheer you up, I remember a (relatively) recent league game which you nicked 1-0 in the 90th.

                • The Lass O Gowrie in Manchester? Now that was a great pub. As I lived down south for a long time I’d only been in and out of Manchester for football and that wasn’t very often (we’re not often in the same division as those two!), so hadn’t visited the pub for a long, long time. So when me and the missus were in Manchester to see the lovely Ms Ellis-Bexter, shortly after moving back up north, I was licking my lips as I dragged her to the pub…and it wasn’t there any more! There’s a long sodding history of my favourite pubs closing down.

                    • Ah, just done a quick Google search and there’s an article from March 2014 saying it was reopening, after closing in January 2014. So we chose to visit it the only month in decades (until recently of course) that it was closed! We’ve been back to Manchester several times but were under the impression it had closed for good, so never went back. And now I’ve stopped drinking it doesn’t have the appeal it used to have.

                      We are good at choosing the wrong moment to visit places though, and have turned up to many places to find that it only closes on two days each year and we chose one of them. I suppose the best example is the only time we have been to Rome. Pope John-Paul II died just before we went, so we were there for the first time in two and a half decades when they weren’t letting people into the Sistine Chapel, cos they were choosing a new Pope. Not that either of us are religious, but it would have been nice to see it. As it was, we visited the Vatican on the day the new Pope was chosen and were able to view John-Paul’s tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica. It was a really hot day though, and my wife was six months pregnant, so we didn’t hang around as there was nowhere to sit, as the seats were all reserved. I don’t think I will ever see as many nuns and priests in my life.

                      We got back to our hotel a few hours later, turned on the TV and they showed the white smoke coming from the Sistine Chapel. We were both tired, as we had walked for miles in the heat. I struggle on my feet anyway, but with the wife being heavily pregnant too we were both worn out. But I said to her that I was pretty sure that from the breakfast terrace you have a clear view of the Pope’s balcony. She was adamant that we couldn’t, so we didn’t walk up to check and watched it on TV. The next morning, at breakfast, we sat looking at the Pope’s balcony. It was at this point that my wife apologised for us missing seeing the first new pope being unveiled in a quarter of a century and that she knew we had a view of the balcony, but she was just too tired to face walking up two more flights of stairs!

  8. Leeds United used to have a very fetching, and unique, blue and gold quarters combo. Then Don Revie came along and decided his team might play more like Real Madrid if they looked like them, hence the change to boring all white, which persists to this day. All white, of course, looks dirty more quickly…

  9. BT Sports are showing a whole bunch of classic football shows from the early 70s onwards at the moment; some lovely old kits on show, especially away versions e.g. Crystal Palace, Leeds, Everton etc.

  10. My Top 10:

    1: Accra Hearts of Oak S.C.
    2: Lincoln Red Imps F.C.
    3: Humble Lions F.C.
    4: Shimizu S-Pulse
    5: RasenBallsport Leipzig e.V.
    6: Barrack Young Controllers F.C.
    7: Miscellaneous S.C.
    8: Cape Coast Mysterious Ebusua Dwarfs
    9: Chicken Inn F.C.
    10: Tottenham Hotspur F.C.

  11. I can’t put them in order of preference, but here are my faves.

    Torino home kit 93/94: a classic Italian kit that keeps it simple.
    QPR home 84/85: the Guinness kit. Strange how a booze-based sponsor can really lift a shirt.
    Newcastle home 96: see reasoning above.
    Man Utd home 84/85 (aka 85 cup final one) Not much love for this out there, but a classic ‘badge in the middle’ kit, in my opinion.
    Milan 92/93: the Motta one with the decent collar. I saw this recently at a vintage footy shirt sale for £99 – I used to have it, but it got lost during house moves.
    Juventus home 84/85: simply gorgeous.
    Everton 85/86: a slight anomaly in Everton kits (it looks more like a Birmingham shirt), but I like it.
    Belgium home kit 84: classic diamond design
    Napoli 87: Maradona-inspired… classic light blue
    Celtic 67: very simple, but iconic.

  13. Back in the early 70’s Brazil and Argentina used to wear grey socks when the colour of the oppositions socks clashed with their own. A lovely touch that in my humble opinion should be reintroduced.

  14. When I first visited the National Football Museum, after it relocated to Manchester, the item that I stood and stared at the most, by a very long way, was the 1977 Subbuteo poster that has all the different kits on it. There were hundreds of them. I had the poster on my wall as a kid. I used to look, longingly, at all the weird African national kits, or European away kits and all the ones that had unique kits. Barnsley were number 1 on the chart, along with Bristol City, Swindon, Brechin and loads of other teams that play in your basic red shirts, white shorts, red socks. Number 2 was the blue shirts, white socks, blue shorts, so that covered Everton, Ipswich, Gillingham, Rochdale, and loads more. But if you looked at Fiorentina, nobody shared their kit. Not that you’d ever happen across a Fiorentina team in a shop in Barnsley.

    My parents just got me whatever was in the second hand shop (ooh, we were poor, etc), but they were usually good ones. I got an England team, but it was the kit they wore immediately prior to the best England kit ever (think 1982, Kevin Keegan*). I got a Brazil one too. That was ace. But when I asked for a Leeds United one (not something I’d admit to now) they got me the nearest to it, hoping I wouldn’t notice. I did notice and I wasn’t happy. That Christmas night, instead of playing the local derby between Barnsley and Leeds, it was Barnsley v St Johnstone away**. I felt cheated.

    But I used to spend hours looking at that poster as a kid. I had it on the wall, just at the top of my stairs (I was in the attic). I would have happily traded a kidney for a Peru or one of the Czechoslovakian teams in garish colours. I got a Bristol Rovers one, just cos I loved their kit. I really wanted a York City one when they had the big Y on the front. Or a Melchester Rovers one. That would have been cool!

    *When Barnsley played at Wembley a few years ago, one of my mates went for a wander with his missus and came back clutching a carrier bag from the stadium shop. I asked him what he’d got and he said “the best England shirt ever, only £25”, to which me and another mate in unison said “what, 1982 Kevin Keegan World Cup one?” Five minutes later we all had one.

    *Might not have been St Johnstone away, but it was a Scottish one, all white, with a blue stripe down the side of the shirt/shorts, as opposed to the blue and yellow of Leeds. I can’t be bothered to go and find the 1977 Subbuteo poster I bought off eBay minutes after leaving the National Football Museum. I’m biding my time before asking the wife whether I can frame it and put it on the wall, particularly as she’s just bought two awful posters she wants me to frame and put on the wall in place of some excellent football pictures I currently have on there. Time will tell whether this is the start of a full campaign to get rid of my stuff…

      • The team I lusted after most on that ’77 poster was number 98 – Palermo. Pink shirts, black shorts. Not merely unique, but at a time when punk had made wearing pink cool, also slightly dangerous.

        It was tough to find in the shops, but I eventually tracked it down. Kept it pristine, and carefully avoided kneeling on any of them. Lost it decades ago. Heaven knows how much it’d be worth now.

        • I don’t like to think about my Subbuteo set, because when me and my girlfriend at the time moved down to Brighton I left it all at her parents house in Liverpool, cos I had taken it over there to play against her kid brother. It was just before the 1990 World Cup finals. I already had around a dozen teams, plus loads of accessories – stands, TV gantry, scoreboard, even a little Prince Phillip and the Queen. There was a toy shop in Liverpool by the bus gyratory that had loads of teams in stock, so I bought loads of the teams that had qualified for the World Cup and me and her brother played the entire World Cup. I think I had nearly every team that was there by the time I’d finished.

          I’d been seeing this girl for 5-6 years, but 6 months after moving to Brighton we split up. She was driving back up to Liverpool shortly after, so I asked her to fetch it back down for me, but she was quite bitter and told me to go and get it myself. Thing is, I still had good mates at the hospital that I was still in touch with, so why I didn’t ask one of them to go and get it is beyond me. But my Subbuteo collection is a very close second to my vinyl collection as to the thing I regret parting with the most. To buy all the Subbuteo teams and everything that I had would set me back well into 4 figures. My son would love it, although I’d be no good at it any more, cos if I knelt down on the carpet I wouldn’t be able to move after 5 minutes, or I’d lose my balance and land on the pitch. I don’t think my son would be happy seeing half his team held together blu tac, like some of mine were back in the day.

          Actually, that reminds me of when I was playing Subbuteo and my auntie walked in and put her foot down straight on one of my goals, breaking the crossbar (like what the Scots did at Wembley!) and one of my keepers. I was distraught…until she returned a few days later with a new set of goals and a set of goalies. They were brill. All I had were the goals that came with the set, with the big green bit of plastic they stood up on, and the keeper she broke was one of the standard keepers that curled backwards in a diving pose. But the goals she bought me were the square ones, without the green plastic, and the keepers were the international set – two keepers (wearing caps I think), but who were stood upright, with their hands stretched out above their head. I could not wait for the next time a mate came round with his team for a game, cos my keepers were twice the size and would save everything. I was the envy of the playground!

          I was hoping my auntie would come round and stand on one of my England players next, cos two of them were already stuck together with blu tac and I only had 10 men since the cat fecked off with one of them and we had no idea what the little sod had done with it.

          • I bought a set for Christmas for my lads (for me really). The new pitch & goals were crap so disappeared down an ebay & subbuteo world rabbit hole. Classic Pitch purchased & now on a board but play suspended at the minute due to lockdown (table required for home schooling and the good weather means the kids are kicked outside)

            Wife & daughter look on bewildered & the lads cannot comprehend a time without wall to wall global football coverage.

            This guy does subbuteo team posters and is reasonable for commissions too. https://www.matthewjiwood.com

            • I expect, given the goalies’ limitations, the change to the back pass rule had little impact on Subbuteo tactics. Also, if you could get Prince Philip back in the day shouldn’t you be able to get Wills and Harry (wearing their Aston Villa scarves) to sit in your stands now..?

        • Pink has sporting associations in Italy – it’s the colour of the leader’s jersey in the giro d’Italia as well as the paper on which la Gazzetta dello Sport is printed.

          It’s a great kit. I have a friend from Palermo who told me that the story goes that in the early days they played in white and someone put a red shirt in with the wash, but I’m pretty sure that’s a Sicilian urban myth.

    • I bought a retro version of the England 82 top – I bloody loved that kit.

      I wore the retro jersey in the pub to watch England in their 2014 World Cup matches against Italy, Uruguay and Costa Rica. I wore it again to watch matches against Russia, Slovakia and Iceland in the 2016 Euros (I was in work for the Wales game, so I was in a suit for that one). It has a proud record of six matches and no wins, so, I retired the bastard and it’s put me right off it.

      Im proud to say that, like most Englishmen, I don’t put English football’s failures down to factors like poor coaching, outdated formations, bad movement, a lack of team unity, trying to shoehorn the best players into the team rather than picking the best team, a lack of technical players, a lack of UEFA-trained coaches at youth level, kids playing on full-sized pitches, shouty parents making kids afraid, players not being able to dribble due to an obsession with one-touch football at youth level, or inadequate training facilities across grassroots level….it was my shirt that did it.

      • I have a pair of jinxed trainers. I got them for my birthday, wore them the following Saturday. We lost. I wore them to the next game. We lost. This carried on for some weeks until we had lost 7 on the bounce. We were then away at Altrincham in the Cup. Part-timers. Surely…

        But no, we lost! To a team several divisions below us. And it absolutely chucked it down. I found out my big waterproof coat was nothing of the sort when I pulled my programme out of my pocket and it was like paper maché. Everything was wet. The journey home was made worse by the the trains being buggered up. When I got home and took my trainers off my socks were drenched. I put my trainers in the warm cupboard. And then it changed…

        Next game, at home to York in the Johnstone Paint Trophy we won, with a last minute wonder goal. I was wearing different trainers! The next match, at home to Port Vale, I retrieved my new trainers from the warm cupboard. Guess what? We lost! 8 league defeats on the bounce, bottom of League One. It was then that it dawned on me. I had cursed trainers. The opposite of Billy’s Boots.

        A week later, Oldham away, I wore a different pair of trainers. We won. A couple of days later we embarked on a run of 7 straight league wins, as well as getting past Wigan and Fleetwood to make it to the final of the Johnstone Paint Trophy. The rest of the season we were brilliant. We won the JPT at Wembley and then scored 4 away at Champions Wigan to qualify for the play offs, where we broke the record for the biggest aggregate League One play off semi-final score against Walsall, who had finished 3 places above us, and then we swept Millwall away in the play off final to win promotion. From bottom of the table at Christmas to 2 Wembley wins (We’d never won at Wembley before) and promotion, all whilst my cursed trainers remained in the cupboard. I haven’t worn them since. I considered wearing them to an U23s game, but I’d probably get run over on the way home.

        For full disclosure, 15 years earlier I had an issue with a lucky pig that I started taking to the match, despite my mates being convinced it was having the opposite effect. It was a small toy, I hasten to add, and not an actual pig. Anyway, I persevered with it, but it all went wrong. Within a year I had got divorced, lost my job, Barnsley had been relegated and gone into administration and I was diagnosed with a spinal cord tumour. The pig was shoved to the bottom of a drawer, where it remains. When looking for something in the drawer recently my son saw the pig and said it was cute and could he have it. I firmly told him to leave the ruddy thing where it was!

  16. Someone else who remembers the big Subbuteo poster here. What did C.100 on the box mean?

    I had the Wales kit as a Subbuteo team, later mid 70s, they were my favourite.
    I also had 2 other great ones.
    Bishop Auckland (Oxford and Cambridge blue halves, black shorts, blue socks) and
    (I think) Northampton Town (or may have been Burnley) away. White shirts with claret and blue piping, brown shorts, white socks with claret and blue tops).
    Indeed, here they are. Yours for £85 each no less!
    https://subbuteo-emporium.co.uk/product/hw-033-bishop-auckland/
    https://subbuteo-emporium.co.uk/product/hw-080-burnley-away-northampton/
    I’ve no idea why I had those two. Never had the faintest love for either team.

    Footy fans can wile away lockdown here.
    http://www.historicalkits.co.uk/English_Football_League/index.html

    • C.100 was simply the company’s catalogue reference number for a standard team set. The various accessories had different C numbers – the floodlights (which everyone wanted, but were always a big disappointment, because they not only impeded play but also could barely illuminate the inside of a matchbox) were C.101

      Anyone craving a bit of Subbuteo nostalgia should enjoy this site: http://www.peter-upton.co.uk/sub1.htm

    • I think the big teams in Subbuteo were more expensive, the reason why I had Darlington and Hamilton Academical I think!

      Few years ago I sold my Subbuteo rugby set to someone in Italy for about 200 quid!

      • £200?!? Mine remained at home (complete with its box and a few extra teams) when I left home. A few years later, anything I hadn’t taken with me was chucked away by my dad. Loads of footy programmes (I only took the Barnsley ones with me, leaving a few hundred behind, including a dozen Cup Finals, 1966 World Cup brochure, etc), loads of Topps footy cards and Panini sticker albums (I’ve since bought lots of this back on eBay) and loads of old games, Subbuteo Rugby and Test Match Cricket included. What I’d give to be transported back to my bedroom in 1988 to rescue stuff that I never took with me…then to jump forward a few years to tell myself to keep my vinyl collection and build a CD collection slowly, rather than flogging it to buy CDs, particularly as most of the earliest CDs I bought have been replaced with special editions or remastered versions.

  17. Team Of The 80s – Macolm Allison and Terry Venables overhauled the kit.
    The claret and blue became red and blue stripes, giving way to the white shirt with red an blue diagonal sash – as rocked by Kenny Sansom, Clive Allen, Vince Hilaire, and a host of others who never fulfilled the dreamed for greatness of the club.
    Still became my third choice team (after Reading and West Ham).

  18. Here we go! Here we go! Proustian rushes all round! Growing up football daft in the West of Scotland in the 70s, many of my strips are from then & despite the pain some are from the World Cup of 1978 (just rewatched the BBC credits – what a theme tune!) Regaining my passion for the game through my lads’ love of it and running one of their teams. Recaptured the buzz of live football by taking them to the mighty Grimsby Town pre-lockdown and marvelling at how it seeps back into your life. God I love it and can’t wait for it to come back. At least me & my old man will have something to talk about again!

    In no particular order:

    1. Scotland 78 World Cup – massive badge & disappointment but oh the optimism as they left Scotland
    2. Argentina 78 – simple & classic
    3. Rangers in the 70s – classic blue top with the big badge, white shorts & red & black shorts
    4. Partick Thistle – red & yellow stripes – brilliant. When I realised the lads’ club colours were red & yellow, there was only one option for their kit
    5. Despite the pain, Peru with that red stripe
    6. Juve 76 – 78ish my old man was a cop on the team bus when they played Rangers in the European Cup & got a team photo & autographs, Bettega, Causio et al – rarely seen on telly & why Subbuteo posters were so popular – the mystique of the European game prior to satellite TV
    7. Anderlecht- lilac – magnificent
    8. My team St Mirren – red away strip c1978 just great plus is there a link with the Buddies, Juve & Grimsby Town? What might have been had we not sacked Fergie?
    9. Italy kits – love the simplicity of the Azzuri
    10. Scotland classic yellow umbro goalkeeper’s kit

    Honourable mentions: aforementioned Dundee & chocolate Coventry kits, any strips with quarters.

    Football offers memories, wonder & community. For all the faults of the Premier League, it is the great meritocracy and many of the modern players are genuine role models and the examples of Rashford & Sterling stand out alongside Jordan Henderson and othets. There are numpties but wouldn’t you go daft in your early 20s if you were earning £50K+ a week? I know I would!

    • As a dyed in the fur Womble since 1972, any Wimbledon kit is wonderful as far as I’m concerned, although I never really took to the dark navy blue kits of our Premiership years -we should always be royal blue. The majority of the Dickie Guy era was basically a copy of Chelsea’s all blue, but the famous FA Cup run of 1974-75 had us add a fetching yellow trim. The first AFC Wimbledon shirt was a straight copy of the one we wore against Leeds.

        • Yup, I was at AFCW’s first ever friendly against Sutton in 2002 and have been a Dons Trust member and season ticket holder ever since. Saw us at the Beaveree several times… we always struggled there for some strange reason, usually involving atrocious referees!

          • Although I’m a Hampton fan I actually came to the first AFC home league game in a gesture of solidarity. Was it a draw? Can’t believe it’s so long ago now.
            Hmmm, atrocious refs eh? I won’t remind you of our 4-0 win at Kingsmeadow then! We are still pointlessly (and a bit pathetically) proud of the fact you didn’t beat us in a league game, when you beat pretty much everyone else!

  20. Love the Subbuteo talk. Me and my mates used to play an elongated Cup competition in our respective houses. Probably early 70’s. Apart from the Man U and Everton staple kits we also had Wolves (we were all fans), Blackpool, Celtic, Derby, Huddersfield/WBA, Coventry, Stoke.

    As for favourite kits…
    Wolves 1973 (think Kenny Hibbitt)
    Man City (red and black stripes)
    Man City (1974 classic home kit)
    Coventry (green and black stripes)
    West Ham (60’s away kit)
    Chelsea (1970 Cup Final)
    Peru, Brazil, Argentina (1978 World Cup classics)

  21. Aaah Subbuteo. Loved it. As a kid I was first given a basic pitch, goals and a couple of standard issue “red shirts and blue shirts” teams. Then via one of my Dad’s very kind work colleagues I was given loads of what must have been 1960’s issue stuff, including about 20 different teams, red pitch fencing with 60’s period ads on, and some fantastic catalogues. For Christmas and then birthday one year I was given a couple of stands and (admittedly very disappointing) floodlights. Once assembled these frankly just got in the way and didn’t get much use other than for display purposes.
    With some other local kids, a league was set up, home and away games, cup competitions, all hotly contested and often disputed. Terrific fun, often with the latest album of the day (often The Jam or The Specials etc) playing in the background. My team (and how I wish I could remember the name) were styled as a plucky non league outfit, punching above their weight with occasional victories against older boys. We even had names for our players, so we could have a top goalscorer competition. I had a mate who specialised in comedy names and his team line ups used to have us in stitches. Happy memories…I will now have to go up to my Mum and Dad’s loft next time I visit. I’m 52 you know.

    • The talk of a Subbuteo league has taken me back to the first school I taught in. Back in the day when you could have a lunch hour, we set up a staff Subbuteo league & we had to adapt our team names to fit existing clubs names, the cleverest of which was the Head of Maths, Mr Male. His team was Real Male & the PE teacher was sarcastically called Nicholson Academicals and so on. It got very competitive & we had to have a “language warning” brought in lest we upset some staff. Repeated breaches led to a player being taken off. Serial winner was the Head of Science who hailed from Devon & was his team was called Bond of the South.

      • This is the stuff. Work based Subbuteo leagues. Great idea. I can totally believe it got competitive. Aah, a lunch hour working in education…I remember those days too.

        • Bond of the South got completely carried away & made a league table out of wood with white rulers with the teams on the back with P W L D F A Pts noted after ever game. Rulers would be moved up & down according to results!

  22. To me the old red Soviet Union shirt with CCCP across the chest is often overlooked, especially the one sported during Euro 88. I also liked the mysteriously enigmatic blue East Germany national shirt with the large DDR above the badge.

  23. Probably mainly because it’s when I became football mad as a kid, the best, most elegant looking kits for me are those from the late 60s and early 70s. Simple, round collars, long sleeves with often contrasting colour cuffs, and no clutter of sponsors names or horrible patterns on the shirts. Think George Best in Man Utd or Northern Ireland shirts; Bobby Moore in West Ham (their, Villa, and Burnley’s claret and blue is surely the best colour combination) or Jimmy Greaves in the classic Tottenham kit.

    Then Revie and Leeds came along with their fancy dan collars and sodding sock garters and ruined to all.

  25. I’d steer clear of a logo or advertising.
    No adidas, no admiral, no nike, don’t want that, it’s not about factories.
    Also, no new badges that were created to thwart sellers outside the ground.
    I value a “Coat of Arms” Forest kit way above any “Tricky Tree” one.

    The Cruyff Ajaz kit of the 60s had no logo, but as far as I can see no badge.
    Did one exist with no logo AND a badge? … that’ll be the one for me … if not, just the all white with a broad red stripe down the middle.

    The late 60s Dutch kit, pre-sponsorship, had no logo, no piping … just vivid orange and a huge badge … that’ll be the international one for me.

    Reading the 1930s newspapers of the South-West, it’s always great to see the weekly Exeter City or Plymouth Argyle photograph on the back page.
    Despite being relatively small, and in black-and-white, it’s remarkable how accurate you can be in guessing the opposition from the kit … Fulham, Northampton Town, Newcastle United, Reading … almost a century on.

    Those 30s shirts were almost like working shirts with loads of buttons and a high collar, not football shirts as we know them. They were also genuinely “rare,” as the clubs, any club from Accrington Stanley to Arsenal, would only have the one set.

  26. I think there has to be a strong element of personal bias for one’s own club guiding the choices, coupled with the era when you became smitten.
    My faves: Chelsea 1970 – by consensus, never bettered. The white stripe & tiny number on the shorts (deemed flash!) & white (or occasionally yellow) socks. Never blue. Ugh!
    The West Ham ‘mod’ hoops away kit
    Ajax 1971 ( with a cool ‘modern’ 14 on the back, obvs.)
    Netherlands 1974 – gods, every last one of them – particularly cool, Cruyff’s 2 stripes Adidas kit.
    Barca 1974 – a dark kit, worn by Cruyff & Neeskens
    St Etienne -late 70s – zingy green with red, white & blue trim
    Brazil – 1970 – obvious, but essential
    AC Milan – Gullit & Van Basten era
    Italy -1990 – nice & dark , as worn by Toto Scillachi ( sp?)
    Peru – which I believe is a tribute to a British team who toured Peru way back when
    Soviet Union – Lev Yashin goalie, all black with CCCP on the front
    the Man City Rodney era kits with the central badge ( including Allison’s AC tribute away shirt)
    My current fave, the Clapton CFC away shirt – gloriously lurid purple, red, yellow & maroon ( the colours of the 2nd Spanish Republic) made by a co op in Italy & yours for only £30 -the best selling non league kit of all time!

    • Its got to be the Netherlands 1974 – the first World Cup I saw in colour, and what a team. It still feels wrong that West Germany won (even if they did have two of the all time greats in Beckenbauer and Muller). I wore an orange Adidas shirt at school for years. Still miss that shirt.

      And you could go for a night out in practically any Italy shirt (well if you had a better physique than me).

      And the other great one is the one my family have just bought me for father’s day (I must tell them) – the current Liverpool shirt with the WCC badge. Ok, its not even the best Liverpool shirt, but still…

      • If memory serves he played alongside a certain M. Platini, then skinny as a rake (!) & as swashbuckling a player as you’ll ever see – post playing career has not been universally admired as much, it must be said!

  27. Talking about great football kits, the greatest World Cup final in the greatest World Cup is 50 years old today!
    Rather alarmingly, Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” was released on 8th June.
    Is this the moment football became cooler than pop music?
    Mungo Jerry v. Pele … I think so.

    On the greatest goal in the greatest World Cup final in the greatest World Cup, it’s very much a “television goal.”
    Pele passes into space, looks a daft pass, “what’s he doing?, Alberto comes from off-screen, drills ball into the corner.
    In the official FIFA film on the 1970 World Cup, you see the goal from the other side of the pitch, and it’s OK, but not nearly as good as from the famous angle.

    Same could probably also be said of Gareth Edwards’ try for the Barbarians.
    Much of its effect would have been lost if it had been scored in the far corner.

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