- Credit must go to the Bayern Central Twitter account, as well as Raimund Simmet’s book on the club’s kits
Unsurprisingly, white change strips form a substantial part of the Bayern Munich kit canon – two of the club’s first three European Cup final victories, against Atlético Madrid and Saint-Étienne were achieved in the colour. Today, we focus on two in particular, in terms of how change items were dealt with (or not).
In 2006, Bayern were still in a two-season cycle for their home and away kits and the new second strip for the coming season was the United design from adidas’s Teamgeist range.
In our view, it was one of the best examples of that style, with the navy trim complementing the red and white to good effect.
A navy set of shorts, like the training set, would have been a good option. However, it did not appear that there were alternative elements available to solve shorts- or socks-clashes – during pre-season, they played Urawa Red Diamonds in a friendly in Japan with both sides in white shorts.
The first half of 2006-07 saw no need for anything other than white shorts with the kit, domestically or in Europe, but during the mid-season break there was another friendly against Urawa, this time as part of the Red Bulls Cup tournament in Salzburg.
Their opponents were again in their first-choice kit of red shirts, white shorts and black socks, but on this occasion Bayern donned the red shorts that been used with their first kit that season (in 2005-06, there were no adidas stripes on the home strip).
As far as we can see, this was the only time that the 2006-08 white strip was worn in anything other than an all-white format but, since then, alternative shorts and socks have tended to be available. The 2015-16 change kit is a good example of that.
Again, it was mainly all-white but it featured a horizontal chest band made up of red and shades of grey. In competitive action, it was only ever worn with white shorts or socks, but again, a friendly against an Asian side generated the need for a mashup.
This time, the opponents were China’s Guangzhou Evergrande in the Audi Football Summit in Guangzhou.
The hosts wore red shirts and socks with white shorts and so Bayern broke out a set of charcoal grey shorts (incidentally, the shirts worn by the players were replicas, for some reason).
That was July 2015 but the season ahead did not throw up a need for the grey shorts to be used again.
