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AL-NASSR FC AWAY 2009-10


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 silver and purple kit in the eighties that I highly recommend you check out and which is one of my most-coveted shirts, but this Al-Nassr shirt makes for a good back-up until I can rob a bank to pay for the Wednesday one.
The yellow and blue stripes are a nice touch. They make the shirt look a bit like it belongs to a team of Swedish cyborgs, but they’re actually a splash of Al-Nassr’s blue and yellow home colours. The yellow and blue represent the sands of the desert and the waters of the Arabian Gulf respectively, and I really like this “one stripe” pattern. It’s relatively uncommon and has some of the style of a sash while not being too “wacky” for a respectable shirt, if for some mad reason you wanted to make one of those.


The geographical basis for the club’s colours are made more obvious on the badge, which has a map of the Arabian Peninsula on it. Okay, “map” might be pushing it. If you were driving to Riyadh to watch Al-Nassr play this wouldn’t help much if you got lost.
A great shirt from a club I don’t know much about, then, although I did learn that a few famous names have been associated with the club over the years. During the time this shirt was in use the club was managed by former Inter goalkeeper Walter Zenga, who managed a bunch of clubs around the world before pitching up at Wolverhampton Wanderers. His first match in charge of Wolves was a 2-2 draw against Rotherham United. He was sacked three months later. More interesting is that Al-Nassr had former Colombia goalkeeper René “El Loco” Higuita on their coaching staff for a while. You know, the guy who performed the gleefully bizarre “scorpion kick” save against England that one time, an event I will never tire of bringing up. Getting Higuita in to train your goalkeepers is an, erm, brave move, so credit to Al Nassr for their boldness.
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