Fantasy Kit Friday – Marseille and Sampdoria mid-90s Umbro

A bit of an overdue one today, with our apologies for the tardiness:

@museumofjerseys suggestion for #FKF.@sampdoria_en or @OM_English in mid 1990s @UmbroUK templates?

— LFCCHAMPIONS19* (@RNSkipper) March 9, 2019

To make up for the delay, we decided to go with both rather than just one of the kits suggested.

In the middle of the 1990s, Umbro were reining back the excesses of the earlier part of the decade but were still experimenting with various different collar styles and fabric patterns.

While Marseille are intrinsically associated with adidas – though they’ve been partnered with Puma since 2018 – for a two-year period in the 1990s they deviated, using Reebok and Mizuno. However, Umbro have had an occasional presence in French football.

For their kit, we have used the Brazil 1994 World Cup strip as the base, with the most notable feature being the crests in the fabric.

Italian sides Inter, Napoli, Lazio, Cagliari and Parma all wore Umbro in the 1990s, but the double-diamond (or Umbro wordmark in this case) didn’t appear on a Sampdoria kit.

This offering perhaps suffers from the fact that their famous striped design overshadows most of the other elements of the kit – this homogeneity counted against any Samp kit appearing in the Football Attic’s 50 Greatest Shirts rankings in 2015.

Here, the template is the one used by England at Euro 96, featuring an unusual neck design but little else in the way of accoutrements.

Feedback is always welcome, as are future FKF requests. Leave a comment below or tweet us @museumofjerseys.