This season has brought a notable change to home kit of Swiss side FC Basel.
While the club are normally clad in red and blue halved shirts, for 2019-20 they have a modified version of the adidas Condivo template, red with blue sleeves (right).
It might seem like and odd change, but only because the halves had achieved such primary in recent years. It wasn’t always thus, however.
Basel did have halves throughout the 1980s and up to 1992, but the change to an adidas Equipment style saw red become the dominant colour and that continued after the switch to Nike in 1997.
The halves returned in 2002 but in 2008 Basel wore blue and red stripes, resembling Barcelona – Barça’s founder Joan Gamper was a former Basel captain and there are those who maintain that the Catalan club took their colours from the Swiss side, while the footballs on the clubs’ respective crests are identical.
The irony was that, in that same summer of 2008, Nike provided Barcelona with a halved shirt, meaning they looked more like Basel.
That Basel kit had a two-year lifespan but in 2010-11, rather than reverting to halves, a team including Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri took to the field in another striped offering (left).
Basel retained the league title and made it three in a row in the same kit in 2011-12 – they would go on to achieve seven consecutive victories – but it was their last Nike kit.
Their return to adidas in 2012 saw the halves reinstated and they remained in place for seven seasons until this most recent change.
Whether it is just temporary and they do things by halves again next season, we shall see.
