Given the style of the layout of these shirts, there looks to be some link between Soccer World and Sport Rendez-vous – whose advertisements feature here – especially as both businesses were based in Leicestershire.
Don’t arrange a pilgrimage to the address listed at the bottom of this brochure, though – rather than a warehouse full of glorious deadstock, you will encounter a five-bedroom detached house.
This was produced at the outset of the 1992-93 season and we can see some of the growing trends in kit design, especially as the adidas Equipment stylings, seen in a limited fashion in 1991-92, were now more commonplace. The shirts shown for France (home) and Germany (home and away) were prototypes that differed slightly from what appeared at Euro 92. Yugoslavia wouldn’t make it to Sweden, of course, but those shirts would have a long lifespan – when the country (reduced to Serbia and Montenegro) came back into the international fold in 1994, that kit was still in use.
However, the fact that some teams still had the older adidas looks was somewhat jarring and an oddity is that the shirts shown for Milan – whose first stint with adidas never featured a three-stripe motif on the jerseys – is from 1990-91, as evidenced by the European Cup badge. For 1992-93, their new sponsors were Motta.
The infamous Fiorentina away shirt is here while Front Runner, an imprint of Bukta, had quite a lot of business going on in Spain at this time. Quite why there was a deviation in branding is something we don’t know, so any information to that end would be welcomed.
