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SPVGG GLÖTTWENG-LANDENSBERG HOME

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 blue it could be a shirt for the Chile national team as designed by someone in the middle of a three-day bender. I’ve seen this shirt template with the red replaced by other colours including purple and a shade of yellow that makes it resemble abstract art of a fried egg, but the red is my favourite. It strikes me of the kind of shirt would inspire confidence in the wearer. Over-confidence, maybe. Surely the amount of misjudged overhead kicks and stuttering Cruyff turns must have increased dramatically while SpVgg Glöttweng-Landensberg were using this as their home strip. It's the kit of the "good guy" team from a kid's show about an intergalactic football tournment, except fully realised in glorious polyester.
I also assumed it was from the nineties at first because, well, look at it - but on closer inspection the tag says "Made in West Germany" and West Germany became regular Germany in 1990 so it must be from the eighties.



Even the back is flamboyant, with a diagonally-aligned player number that you’d never get away with in a humdrum “proper” league, and it suddenly occurs to me that SpVgg Glöttweng-Landensberg might have chosen this kit template purely because it’s easier to fit the club’s name on the back if they print it diagonally.
As for the club itself, I could find barely any information about them. Glöttweng and Landensberg are a pair of villages about sixty-five miles north-west of Munich separated by the river Glött. I hope you enjoyed this geography lesson. As I mentioned in the Avellino Zurigo post I’d have liked to take a digital tour of the area, but thanks to Google’s issues with German privacy laws there’s no streetview available. What I can say about SpVgg Glöttweng-Landensberg is that their home colours are red and white and they’re still around, having played some games earlier this year. And… that’s about it. They don’t even seem to have a club website. It’s a shame I can’t learn more about the club, but oh well, at least I’ve got this shirt – and once I find a suitable frame, a replacement for my bedroom mirror.

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