World Cup Kit Parade 2010: Nike

I like to think of the office where the Nike World Cup kit designers work as being divided into three sections, each labelled ‘Sane’, ‘Slightly Silly’ and ‘Monster Raving Loony’. When you’ve seen the kits they’ve come up with for this summer’s tournament, it’s easy to spot which kit was designed by which part of the office.

At the neat and stylish end of their product range you’ll find the understated cool stitched into every fibre of the home shirts worn by Brazil, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the USA. A common theme on each is a single round-ended stripe in a contrasting colour running along the shoulders as it does down the sides of the shorts. A simple device which works a treat without being too showy.

If, however, you’re looking for something a little more daring, Nike won’t leave your desires unfulfilled. Both the Australia shirts (home and away) have a broad block of colour spanning the shoulders and sleeves, a thin second band of colour just below that and the rest of the shirt in the main third colour. Bold and uncomplicated, it hasn’t found favour with everybody – indeed one writer in The Guardian likened the home shirt to the sort of garb donned by an Aussie one-day cricketer.

Elsewhere, Nike’s Serbia home shirt has a white cross intersectioned over the right breast which scores points for originality, while Portugal’s home and away kit also set one foot beyond the boundaries of modest inoffensiveness.

The home strip is no longer all red for the first time in many a year and the shirt features a broad green band across the upper chest. The away shirt is all white and has a racy green and red double-stripe running down the centre from top to bottom.

But if that’s not extravagant enough for you, why not try the new Slovenia home and away shirts? Both look resplendent (if that’s the word I’m looking for) with a zig-zagging stripe spanning at mid-chest level. The white home shirt has a green zig-zag and the green away shirt has a white zig-zag. One can only guess whether the designer was an amateur mountaineer or perhaps a doctor that works with heart-rate charts. Strange...

All things considered then, Nike have provided something for everyone – normal kits, abnormal kits and something in-between, all of them well made and all likely to prove popular with fans around the world.

Coming soon: Part 3 - Puma and their off-the-shoulder numbers...

Our great thanks go to John Devlin from True Colours Football Kits (www.truecoloursfootballkits.com) for the use of his excellent football kit graphics. To see all of John's World Cup kit designs in greater detail, click here.)

Football Kits 2008/09: Who makes what

Before we press on with other matters, here's a final word on the subject of football kits.

Just before the current domestic football season started here in the UK, we carried out some research to see which kit manufacturers were the most popular among the 92 league clubs, and duly compared our findings to those of last year.

For 2008/09, we can confirm that Umbro are the most popular kit manufacturer with eleven teams in their portfolio, five of which are (somewhat impressively) in the Premier League. The next most popular is Vandanel - a name that may not be too familiar to you if you support a team playing below the Championship.

Vandanel are an Essex-based company who have been in the sportswear industry for about twenty years and are now the suppliers of kit for ten Football League teams including Gillingham, Notts County and Tranmere Rovers. As you can see from these three examples showing their current shirts for Port Vale, Northampton and Darlington, they're not at all bad either.



Puma and Nike are next with nine teams each, and here you'll find a slight difference in approach between the two companies. While Nike can claim to have secured the contracts of clubs like Arsenal, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Fulham, Puma have only Tottenham by way of a 'star name'. Instead, their portfolio focuses largely on numerous teams from lower down the leagues like Coventry, Plymouth and Leyton Orient.

Further down the list are Errea, best known as the long-running suppliers of kit for Middlesbrough - they provide for seven teams - and Adidas who, out of the 92 clubs of the Football League produce kit for just six. That said, three of them are Chelsea, Liverpool and Newcastle.

All in all, there are 26 kit companies plying their trade this season - down three on last season - and one of the names to disappear off the list is Southampton FC. That's right: The Saints have made their own kit since 1999, but not any more - they've decided to go with Umbro for the foreseeable future.

Also falling by the wayside for 2008/09 is Bourne Red, the name for Bournemouth's own football kit company, plus one of the most famous names of all - Admiral. Only Leeds United had an Admiral strip last season, but with Macron securing the new contract, the one-time England kit suppliers are now absent from the football scene.

Other well-known names on the wane are Diadora (five clubs last year, three this), Hummel (Barnet last year, no club this year) and Surridge (down from four clubs to two) while Champion burst onto the scene with Wigan's new kit and Carbrini make their debut with Bournemouth and Luton's new attire.

Full list of kits (by manufacturer):
Adidas: Chelsea, Derby, Liverpool; Bukta: Chesterfield, Millwall; Canterbury: Portsmouth; Carbrini: Bournemouth, Luton; Carlotti: Blackpool, Oldham, Rotherham, Scunthorpe; Champion: Wigan; Diadora: Preston, Stockport, Watford; Errea: Brighton, Bristol Rovers, Burnley, Cheltenham, Crystal Palace, Grimsby, Middlesbrough; Gazelle Sports: Chester; Jako: Leicester; Joma: Cardiff, Charlton; Le Coq Sportif: Carlisle, Man City, Sheffield Utd, Stoke, Wolves; Lotto: Barnsley, Crewe, QPR, Sheffield Wed, Swindon; Macron: Leeds; Mitre: Huddersfield, Ipswich; Nike: Arsenal, Aston Villa, Fulham, Hartlepool, Hereford, Man United, Milton Keynes Dons, Rochdale, Southend; ProStar: Accrington Stanley, Shrewsbury; Puma: Brentford, Bristol City, Colchester, Coventry, Leyton Orient, Morecambe, Plymouth, Reading, Tottenham; Reebok: Bolton; SHO: Exeter; Sport Italia: Aldershot; Surridge: Bradford, Bury; Swift: Walsall; Umbro: Birmingham, Blackburn; Everton, Hull, Lincoln, Nottm Forest, Southampton, Sunderland, Swansea, West Brom, West Ham; Vandanel; Barnet, Dagenham & Redbridge, Darlington, Doncaster, Gillingham, Northampton, Notts County, Port Vale, Tranmere, Yeovil; Xara: Norwich.

Shirts for 2007/08: The Final Verdict

You may remember between May and October last year, we gave you the chance to get an early look at some of the new shirts being released for the 2007/2008 season. Not only that but we also gave you the chance to tell us what you thought of them by providing an online vote in each case.

Well now the season's ended, we can tell you which shirts were the most popular amongst you, our fine and, may we say, rather smartly-dressed audience.

You'll recall we featured one new shirt per Premier League team so as to provide a fair balance throughout, and you were given the option to vote for either 'Excellent', 'Good', 'OK', 'Poor' or 'Terrible'.

All that taken into account, it gives us great pleasure to announce that on 'Excellent' votes alone, your favourite shirt was this one worn by Aston Villa away from home:



Out of all your votes for this shirt, 66% of you said it was 'Excellent' and based on 'Excellent' and 'Good' votes combined, it picked up 85%.

For your reference, here's the top 3 shirts in the 'Excellent' category:

1. Aston Villa (away) 66%
2. Portsmouth (3rd) 61%
3. Man United (away) 59%

...and in the 'Excellent' and 'Good' combined votes category, things were a little closer:

=1. Aston Villa (away) and Portsmouth (3rd) 85%
2. Tottenham (home) 74%
=3. Derby (home) and Man United (away) 72%

At the other end of the scale, Chelsea's new flourescent yellow away shirt proved to be the most unpopular. Out of all your votes cast, 56% said it was 'Terrible'. It also cleaned up when adding the 'Terrible' votes to the 'Poor' ones. Again, it was the least liked with 67% of the vote share.

Here's the three least liked shirts in terms of 'Terrible' votes:

1. Chelsea (away) 56%
2. Manchester City (home) 28%
3. Reading (away) 25%

...and when adding 'Terrible' votes to 'Poor' ones...

1. Chelsea (away) 67%
2. Reading (away) 41%
3. Manchester City (home) 40%

So congratulations to Nike who obviously tapped into the wants and needs of the Villa fan market perfectly, if not the Man United equivalent too. Points deducted for Adidas who thought a luminous yellow shirt would be highly popular outside of Stamford Bridge, and as for Puma, we have one piece of advice: 'Battleship Grey' is only a good colour for battleships.

Thanks to you all for voting and look out for some 2008/2009 shirt votes coming very soon...

World Cup Memories #4

by Chris Oakley

And now a different sort of World Cup memory. We go back to the summer of 1998. People all over the world are gearing up for the Finals to be held in France and on their way from South America are the Brazilians.

Any true football fan finds no difficulty in conjuring up images of those yellow-shirted maestros and their amazing silky skills, but Nike obviously thought we needed some help.

So to publicise their new range of sports apparel, they created a fabulous TV commercial featuring the stars of the Brazilian team playing football in and around an airport.

It was inspired. We may not have all rushed out in our droves buying Nike t-shirts, but many of us did allow a broad smile to break out on our face as we watched Ronaldo and co. playing the fools in a non-footballing environment.

Sadly, like the end of the advert, Brazil's luck ran out in the 1998 World Cup Final, losing 3-0 to the host country, yet with a raft of similar adverts showing football stars doing their thing following on in its wake ever since, who's to say this advert wasn't a success in it's own right? I loved it then, and it's just as good when you watch it now.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1857284069598884079&q=nike+brazil