I must start this article with a confession. While I support Rotherham United now, I was raised as a fan of Rotherham’s closest rivals, Sheffield Wednesday. “Closest” for Rotherham fans, anyway – Wednesday don’t give much of a damn about Rotherham, in my experience. It’s hardly in the same league as switching allegiance from Celtic to Rangers, I know, but I admit I still feel the faintest twinge of guilt over my fondness for Wednesday. No such fond wishes for Sheffield United, of course. I’m not a complete monster. Anyway, today I’m looking at a shirt from that Wednesday-supporting period of my youth, with Sheffield Wednesday’s 1993-95 away kit. A very nice shirt it is too. Yellow and black is often a good combination, and the yellow pinstripes give the kit a nice balance, breaking up what would otherwise look an awful lot like a referee’s shirt. Actually, I believe Wednesday went with a black away kit in 1993 because the rules around Premier League referee’s shirts changed a...

A couple of posts ago I talked about a shirt from US Avellino , a team I almost accidentally ended up  semi-following after playing as them in a football management sim. I considered myself very lucky to pick up even one decently-priced Avellino shirt, but my most recent pick-up was another Avellino shirt – well, sort of. It’s US Avellino Zurigo’s 2006-10 kit! There’s a lot of guesswork on my part when it comes to this shirt. Pictures on the club website show players wearing it in pictures marked from 2006 to 2010, but I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a home or away shirt, or perhaps even both. US Avellino do traditionally have green home shirts and a white change strip – but this isn’t the Italian US Avellino 1912. It’s US Avellino Zurigo, founded in 2003 in Switzerland. Zurich, specifically, which is why they’re Avellino Zurigo. Presumably founded by Italian ex-pats or the descendants thereof who supported the original Avellino, Avellino Zurigo are a non-league ...

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...

  This was probably just me, but when I was a kid I did wonder whether the reason you saw so few football teams wearing green was the worry that they’d blend in with the pitch and thus become difficult to see. I don’t know how I thought this’d translate down at pitch level; maybe the players would just see floating shorts and hovering limbs. Look, gimme a break, I was a pre-teen. If wearing green does make it more difficult to pick out your teammates, here’s a shirt from a club that decided to take that risk. It’s Italian club US Avellino 1912’s 1995-96 home shirt! It’s a shirt that most definitely comes from the nineties. The abstract pattern and spray-brushed look of the sleeves and the Diadora logo woven into the polyester body of the shirt itself anchor the shirt very much in that time period – although the lace-up “granddad” collar and the embroidered badge do give this kit just the whiff of a bygone age, when the footballs were made from unrelenting leather and e...

And now, a tale of cultures coming together, of the meeting of East and West, of an admittedly quite boring shirt but an interesting provenance. All the way from China, it’s Chengdu Blades 2006-2008 home shirt! Let’s start with the obvious: this isn’t an interesting football shirt, design-wise. I imagine it’s a barely-altered template kit from Umbro, with only the stitched-on white stripe and the badge stopping it from being just a red t-shirt. That said, one side of the shirt has neither a badge nor the white stripe, so I suppose it’s half a red t-shirt. I’m glad I own this shirt for the history behind it, though. It’s a twisty-turny story that begins in 1996 with the formation of Chengdu Wuniu, a Chinese football team named after a brand of cigarettes. They started playing in the Chinese third tier, won a promotion and then in 2001 it all rather fell apart when they were busted for match fixing. It might be unfair, but the first thing I think of when I hear the phrase “C...

Never was the phrase “championes, championes, olé olé olé” more appropriate than between 2008 and 2012, when Spain won the 2008 and 2012 European Championships and even managed to claim their first ever World Cup victory in 2010 despite Nigel de Jong trying to kick Xabi Alonso’s lungs out through his back during the final . An astonishing period of international dominance, then, and here’s the shirt that they wore while winning Euro 2012. Okay, so it’s an away shirt that they wore once in the group stages, but here it is. Sky blue and black isn’t a colour combination you see all that often on football shirts, which is a shame because it’s a good pairing. Perhaps black and blue are so inescapably associated with Inter that other teams tend to avoid it, but Spain went with it for this away shirt. The black trim feels rather disjointed on this shirt, with the Adidas stripes not going all the way down the sleeves and the cuffs not being black all the way around. It’s all a bit...