Skip to main content

FLUMINENSE FC HOME 2001-03 (FAKE)


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 somewhere as far away as Brazil. It has an indescribable feeling of belonging to a place that’s familiar yet different, which is kind of how I feel about Brazilian club football. Everyone knows about Brazil’s national team and that the country is possibly the most football-mad nation in the world, but their league teams generally remain mysterious thanks to (presumably) a lack of televised South American league football. So, this is a visually interesting shirt and a glimpse into a part of the football world I don’t often see – so it’s a shame it’s a fake.


My suspicions were first raised by the badge, which looks okay at first glance until you notice that the stars aren’t embroidered very well and they’ve still got threads travelling between then. From there, more flaws became apparent. The sponsor is printed directly onto the shirt rather than being the raised, flocked logo of an official shirt. The stripes on the collar don’t match the real thing, the inner stripes aren’t aligned properly and, most damning of all, the stitching on the shoulders means that the Adidas stripes are twisted out of shape. There’s no way Adidas would have let that fly on a legit product. Not that the official shirt didn’t have problems, mind you – it had a tag on the side that read “Authentic Lincensed Product.” Whoops.
To finish, let’s have a look at a clip of the most famous player to wear this particular shirt – Brazilian goal machine and current Federal Senator Romário.



I know it’s hardly the most spectacular goal Romário ever scored, but I enjoy the baffling sight of the defender dithering on the ball when he knows Romário, of all people, is right behind him. That's like sauntering through the lion enclosure wearing a suit made from steak.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ROTHERHAM UNITED AWAY 1993-94

For Football Laundry’s inaugural post, it seemed appropriate to look at a shirt from the team I actually support. That would be Rotherham United, my home-town club, a club almost entirely without glamour whose most famous celebrity fans are the Chuckle Brothers . Still, I feel like Rotherham United punch above their weight a lot of the time, with the upcoming season being another one spent in the Championship - Premier League, here we come. Anyway, let’s check out Rotherham’s 1993-94 away shirt, shall we? Made by Matchwinner, this is perfect example of mid-nineties away kit design. While the home shirts were (mostly) kept fairly straightforward in deference to the traditions of the clubs and to avoid upsetting the fans, away shirts were fair game for experimentation. Yellow has been a pretty common colour for Rotherham’s away shirts over the years, and here it’s complemented - perhaps not the right word – by a swirling spray of black that could be intended to evoke tiger st...
1 comment
Read more

US AVELLINO 1912 HOME 1995-96

  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...
Post a Comment
Read more

SPAIN AWAY EURO 2012

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...
Post a Comment
Read more