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...

Every now and then I stop and think about just how many football clubs exists around the world. “A lot” doesn’t quite seem to cut it. 737 teams took part in last year’s FA Cup, and that’s just English clubs that qualified. Multiply that by all the countries around the world where football is played at least semi-professionally (so almost all of them) and you have a mind-boggling amount of players, fixtures, results, small pennants with fringe around the edge, old blokes in pubs telling you that they were there for That Famous Match, badges and, yes, kits. Dronfield Town FC are definitely one of those teams, and here’s one of their home shirts. Dronfield’s a small Derbyshire town located fairly near to where I live, which is probably why I managed to find this shirt in a local charity shop. I can’t tell you what year it’s from, but there’s not a huge window to chose from given that Dronfield Town were formed in 1998. I’d guess around the turn of the millennium. The Dronfield ...

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...