- Chroniques Bleues is an excellent French site, with plenty more info on their kits
We’ve said it before, but it’s important to repeat it – as templates go, the Nike Vapor range in 2016 was far from terrible.
With raglan sleeves and a stripe down the side of the shirts continuing on to the shorts, there was a lot to work with. However, what made the perception of the style worse was the fact that, in many cases, Nike decided to deviate from teams’ traditional shorts and/or sock colours.
For instance, France kept their traditional red socks, but they had blue shorts (as they had in 2012) – however, if the navy stripe was red and continued on white shorts, it would have looked great.
That’s not a debate to had for today, but it is France we focus on. We have to admit to being disappointed England lost to Iceland in the last 16 at Euro 2016 – not because of any great love for the team, but because it meant that they would have played France in the quarter-finals and we wanted to see what would happen in terms of the red-sock clash.
Most likely, it would have been England in all-white, but in 2017 we got to see what France had to do when a similar situation arose, away to Bulgaria in a World Cup qualifier.
When they had met in Paris in October 2016, Bulgaria switched from red socks to green, and the expectation for the return game in Sofia would have been that France would use their navy away socks.
Instead, they wore the white set which had been used in Euro 2016 against Switzerland, giving a Chelseaesque look.
An early Blaise Matuidi goal gave France a 1-0 win but, despite the 100 percent record, blue-blue-white hasn’t been seen since – not that they haven’t used alternative combinations.
Another new kit combination for France tonight against Belgium, making it six from six pic.twitter.com/jhnJelmGJR
— Museum of Jerseys (@museumofjerseys) July 10, 2018