Great one-offs – Hamburg, Schalke and Stuttgart, 1992

Technically, all 18 Bundesliga clubs wore one-off kits on the weekend of December 18, 1992.

Following the racially motivated Rostock-Lichtenhagen riots the previous August, it was decided that teams would eschew their sponsors’ logos for one round of fixtures, with the slogan “Mein Freund ist Ausländer” (“my friend is a foreigner”) on the front of shirts instead.

For most clubs, that meant merely adapting their regular shirts (though Bayern Munich dug out an old set for their mascots and put the message on those shirts). However, at least three clubs did wear shirts which differed from their usual strips.

The reigning champions VfB Stuttgart were away to Werder Bremen, meaning that they had switch from their white home kit. Both of their normal shirts had the adidas design with three stripes over the right shoulder and coming up from the left leg, but for this game they wore the style which had the stripes over both shoulders, along with plain shorts.

On the normal shirts, the wordmark of sponsors Sudmilch was carried on a contrasting rectangle, though due to Uefa rules, those rectangles were blank for European games.

These rectangles were present on the kit worn by the players in Bremen, but the home shirts worn by the mascots were devoid of them.

Even then, while the Stuttgart kit was different, it wasn’t a million miles away from the regular kit. The same, however, couldn’t be said of Schalke 04, who played Bayern.

Their distinctive 1991-92 home had been carried forward but they wore a blue and white kit in the same style as Stuttgart.

Switching from a trefoil shirt to a new adidas Equipment style made sense, which is why Hamburg’s change was puzzling – especially as their ‘real’ home shirt was the same design as that appropriated by Stuttgart and Schalke, white with two sets of red stripes over the shoulders (note Manchester United being beaten to the Sharp Viewcam punch by a year too).

We’re not sure why they couldn’t be given an adidas Equipment kit, given that the rest of the three-stripe stable were, but they appeared to turn back the clock by wearing a trefoil shirt.

While the shirt kind of resembled that of 1984-87, this exact model hadn’t been used by the club before and the fabric pattern also seemed unique.

One would imagine that they are part of the holy grail for any Hamburg shirt-collectors – this man certainly regards it as one of his prized articles – so, it’s far to say that, sometimes, good can come from mindless rioting.