England are the home team for tonight’s Euro 2020 clash against Scotland at Wembley.
It sounds obvious but it’s not always a guarantee that a country playing a major finals game are in their own country the ‘home team’ – Turkey were the home side against Italy last week, for instance and there are quite a few examples of World Cup hosts playing in change kits.
However, despite this situation, it is England who have to modify their kit, wearing the same white change shorts used against Croatia, while Scotland are in all-navy – it looks like a mashup but it is their current first-choice kit. As can be seem from that link, Scotland do have white change shorts that could have been worn but Uefa don’t tend to like crossover kit matchups such as white shirts, navy shorts and white socks v navy shirts, white shorts and navy socks.
It is at least a better situation than the countries’ last two competitive meetings, in the qualifiers for the 2018 World Cup. This was the period where England were in the original Nike Vapor style, with white shorts and red socks – the lower-body permutation that quite a lot of Scotland fans would favour – while Scotland had white sleeves on their home shirts.
While England’s arms were very light blue, it was still a sleeve-clash and a shorts-clash in Uefa’s eyes and so both visiting sides had to wear change kits. At Wembley in November 2016, Scotland wore their pink and black second kit and then, the following June, even though England had replaced their red away strip, the new one was navy and so the red was called into action again, worn with the red home socks rather than the blue change set.
Will we ever again see the ‘proper’ kit permutations on show in the world’s oldest international? We can only hope.
UEFA are taking away all the tradition of seeing teams in their ‘proper’ kits. Chelsea play in all blue at Spurs, there are no issues there re the kit, why do UEFA see differently? It’s not as if the old issue of black and white TVs is still around. As an aside, would love to see the Scots back in their blue/white/red combo.
As you have said those are the colors you expect to see in that game and not this all white kit.
I can give uefa/fifa the benefit of the doubt in some games off insisting it’s an all light kit vs all dark kits on occasions (to help the officials as much as possible etc) but when say the other night it’s Germany vs France and nether team is in their traditional colour combinations then you know it’s going/gone too far…… personally I prefer Scotland in navy socks (with white shorts) but they should always have a back up red pair for sock clashes and of course only go with the red socks in England games so we have the classic navy/white/red vs white/navy/white like we always did in the 80s.
seeing the germans in all white is just wrong… bit like the swedes in all yellow. UEFA overdoing it like FIFA did in Brazil 2014.. as an aside, wonder if we will ever get full kit galleries for individual teams (including mashups) – the graphics on here are sharper than any other site ive seen!
Thanks Roger, that’s on the to-do list!