Today we’re looking at shirt from top-flight Brazilian club Fluminense, with their 2001-03 home shirt – a kit for which the word “striped” does not seem sufficient. Looking like stick of seaside rock in a variety of fruity flavours, it’s a bold design from Adidas that combines Fluminense’s traditional burgundy, green and white stripes with a thick red stripe across the shoulders, presumably included to give the famous three stripes of Adidas a clear space to work with. Despite the visual busyness of the kit I think it all comes together in a rather pleasing way, possibly because the relatively muted colours keep things calm even when you look more closely and realise that each white stripe has a very narrow red and green stripe down each side. There are herds of zebra with fewer stripes than this shirt. What I do like about it is that it has an exotic flavour to it. Personally, as a British football fan this is the kind of shirt that really does look as though it comes from ...

If you were putting together a list of history’s most iconic football kits, the gold and green of Brazil would surely be right at the top. I mean, number one with a bullet. What else could possibly compete? It’s practically the uniform of the World Cup itself, the outfit of some truly legendary players, the merest hint of it summoning forth memories of incredible goals, incredible teams and, incredibly, a good television commercial . Yes, it would be wonderful if I had an official Brazil shirt. I don’t. I have this thing instead, I’m sure a lot of kids who were into football ended up with unofficial versions of shirts, cheap knock-offs and loosely club-affiliated “street wear” tops bought by relatives who didn’t know better or who (understandably) baulked at paying ridiculous prices for real-deal shirts. I definitely had some of these shirts growing up in varying degrees of quality, from a retro-style t-shirt based on Brazil’s seventies shirts that I loved so much I wore it ...

The name of Saudi Arabian team Al-Nassr FC means “the victory,” which feels a bit presumptuous. Fortunately for Al-Nassr they’re one of the country’s more successful teams and have presumably avoided their name becoming a target of ironic mockery. They certainly felt confident enough to wear a silver away shirt during the 2009-10 season, which is what I believe is called a “power move.” I do mean silver , too. This shirt isn’t simply grey, and although it’s difficult to get across in photographs it’s very shiny and metallic-looking. Anyone wearing this shirt looks like they’re all wrapped up and ready to go in the oven for an hour at 200ºC, and I absolutely love it. A few teams have gone down the painfully ostentatious route of having a metallic gold shirt, most famously with an Arsenal away shirt in the early 2000s and a couple of seasons ago AC Milan had a gold keeper kit, but there aren’t many silver shirts out there. Sheffield Wednesday had a frankly astonishing silve...

The problem with collecting and writing about football shirts from ultra-obscure non-league European teams is that sometimes you’re faced with a team called SpVgg Glöttweng-Landensberg and you have to type out “SpVgg Glöttweng-Landensberg” multiple times, only to realise too late – far too late – that you could have just copy-pasted the name SpVgg Glöttweng-Landensberg each time. In other news, my carpal tunnel syndrome is coming along nicely. Playing way, way down in the regional Kreisliga system at the furthest reaches of the German football pyramid, SpVgg Glöttweng-Landensberg at some point ran out in this shirt. And what a shirt it is! I know it’s just a Puma teamwear shirt that was probably worn by hundreds of other non-league teams but it’s got a real sense of va-va-voom to it, as Thierry Henry might say if you paid him enough. It’s got both stars and stripes but doesn’t come across as being related to the USA at all, although I’ll grant that if the black parts were b...