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.