As I’ve mentioned, I’m a big fan of the gaudier end of the football shirt spectrum; those kits where the designers frolicked fancy-free across their polyester canvas, shirts with eye-straining patterns or clashing colours, shirts that become a kind of potent anti-fashion. I figured it’s about time I covered one of those shirts here at Football Laundry, so I give to you AFC Ajax’s 1997-98 away shirt.
It’s so close to being a "normal" shirt, too. Very dark blue with a bit of coloured piping is hardly ground-breaking stuff, but as you can see Umbro’s designers didn’t stop there. I like to think it began with the faint red gradient at the shoulders, followed by the unusual vertical position of the sponsor’s logo before descending into a repetitive madness of clone-stamped Ajax badges.
The club wanted to make absolutely sure you didn’t – couldn’t – forget that this is an Ajax shirt by including the club’s badge no less than nineteen times. There’s the badge itself, five badges on each sleeve, five on the front, one as part of the “School of Excellence” logo, and a small fabric tag near the collar. Oh, and it says “Ajax” down each side of the shirt, too. You know, just in case.
Finally, even the shirt’s button is embossed with a tiny Ajax badge. I’d always assumed that the figure on Ajax’s badge is the legendary Ancient Greek hero Ajax, and indeed it is. What I didn’t know is that the depiction of Ajax is drawn with eleven lines to represent the eleven players of a football team. Neat. I can just imagine hordes of Dutch schoolkids practising over and over again until they could draw perfect copies of the Ajax badge on their exercise books, just like many of the kids I grew up with did with Sheffield Wednesday’s old geometric owl badge.
There’s one other mystery surrounding this shirt – besides the mystery of “why so many badges,” I mean – and that’s that there seem to be two different versions. I’ve seen match footage of Ajax playing in this shirt, except the badges on the front are a barely-visible blue-grey colour and not the garish red orbs seen on this version. My leading theory is that the version pictured here is the replica version sold to fans and the actual match shirts were toned down – and I suspect the change was made because the red badges on this shirt make the sponsor’s logo quite difficult to read. I imagine sponsors don’t like that kind of thing.
All in all, this is an extremely busy and overcomplicated shirt that almost veers towards “car covered in bible verses and severed doll’s heads” weirdness territory, and that makes it rather good fun. It’s difficult to imagine a British club putting out a shirt like this, what with Britain’s tendency towards self-deprecation, but fair play to Ajax. They’re Ajax, and they’re glad they’re Ajax, and now you’ll never be able to forget the Ajax badge. Mission accomplished.
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