“Be the stripes” is the advertising tagline for the new Juventus home shirt but, as the eagle-eyed among you will have spotted, the stripes for the 2019-20 home shirt are so large that they are halves (it’s a bit like Southampton in 2012-13, using the fact that they weren’t wearing proper stripes to make a striped marketing motif).
Juve gave the strip its first outing last Sunday night against Roma. It’s not a bad kit in and of itself, but it certainly doesn’t scream Juventus.
Apparently, there was a fear that black-and-white striped shirts reminded the buying public in the USA of NFL referees – there’s no word on the Italian market’s sensibilities. As well, the addition of pink, the club’s original colour, should probably have been done on a normal striped shirt.
It’s interesting to note, too, that the Scudetto on the shirts features the club’s crest repeated as a shadow tone.
Great care was taken there, but the same can’t be said of the baselayer situation. As Jay from Design Football noted in his recent series, the options for halved shirts are scant and Juve aren’t bucking that trend, or at least they didn’t on Sunday.
Juve are using the new Adipro goalkeeper design, but the shirt on sale in the club shop is black – we don’t know if this will be allowed with the home shirt or only worn with the as-yet-unlaunched change kit.
On Sunday, Wojciech Szczesny wore green but he did at least have a baselayer which matched both of his sleeves. However, the Pole loses marks for wearing leggings and no team-issue socks.
Leggings and no socks! That’s too far
The halved shirts are bad enough, but for me Juve should always wear white shorts and socks. The new kit looks far too black.