Given the two shirts that have followed it – including this season’s halved effort – the 2017-18 Juventus shirt (right) remains the last properly traditional offering provided to the club by adidas.
With a white grandad collar and unsullied sleeves thanks to the three stripes being down the sides, it’s not far off as good as you’ll get with an adidas-branded Juve shirt, in our view.
Perhaps the fact that 2017 marked the introduction of a controversial new crest meant that the qualities of the kit itself were overlooked, while the addition of the Scudetto and the Coppa Italia coccarda along with the badge and adidas logo made for quite a cluttered look.
There was another striped shirt that season, though, and it’s hard to find any faults with it.
November 1, 2017 marked the 120th anniversary of the creation of Sport-Club Juventus by pupils at Liceo Classico Massimo d’Azeglio. To mark the occasion, it was decided that, for the next home game, against Benevento on November 5, a commemorative strip would be worn.
While Juventus originally work pink shirts, the special kit was instead a ‘classic’ Juve look. In Britian, a crew neck and cuffs signals memories of the 1960s and 1970s, but in fact Juve had this style in the 1940s and 1950s, with the white collar and black cuffs living up to historical accuracy.
Ideally, Serie A would have allowed the competition crest to be dispensed with for this one game, likewise the shorts number, but otherwise it’s close to perfection, with the three gold stars – each one representing ten titles – managing to evoke the past while also being bang up to date.
The shirt did carry adidas and Jeep logos, but – like the 120th anniversary shirt that Bayern Munich have come up with – they were ‘ghosted’ on and almost invisible. The shorts did have three adidas stripes, but they were white on white.
After railing against tradition for 2019-20, Juve are due something classical for 2020-21 – we can only pray that something like this is the basis for it.
