Fantasy Kit Friday – France and Croatia mid-90s Nike and 2018 adidas

Sunday’s World Cup final between France and Croatia will be the first to be contested by two sides wearing Nike kits (coupled with Portugal’s 2016 European Championship win, it will be the first time that Nike will have ‘held’ the world and European titles at the same time).

Croatia have been with Nike since 2000, while France coupled with the American firm in 2010. When they met in the 1998 World Cup semi-final, it was adidas v Lotto:

France v Croatia, 1998 World Cup semi-final pic.twitter.com/xHT7rUKHJl

— Museum of Jerseys (@museumofjerseys) July 11, 2018

For this week’s Fantasy Kit Friday, we decided to go back to Nike’s big push into football in the mid-1990s. While France obviously had a more traditional colourway back then, we kept the current scheme and applied it to the 1996-98 Arsenal template.

For Croatia, we went back a bit further, taking elements from the Borussia Dortmund and Paris St-Germain kits.

And then Simon Treanor suggested something else:

ooh, could we get a "what if both teams were wearing adidas now?"

— Boateng/Hummels/Müller (@simontreanor) July 13, 2018

Of course, it made us wonder why we hadn’t thought of it ourselves. Retro vibes have underpinned most of adidas’s offerings at the World Cup and so we felt that was the best route to follow.

For France, we felt it’d be too obvious to go down the 1984/1998 route and so instead we revisited their 1990-92 kit (with the traditional colour-scheme restored).

For Croatia, the option to use adidas’s Condivo template was tempting, given that it is kind of chequered, but nothing worked to our satisfaction and so instead we refreshed the Lotto 1998 style.