Fantasy Kit Friday – A misspent youth, part 3

This follows two instalments that were posted last year, charting the imaginary teams I created in the late 1990s – see here for part 1 and here for part 2

Olympique Longeau (France)

While the method for choosing team names, as outlined in the previous editions, was finding places close to cities housing real teams, this was something of an oddity – Longeau-Percey is in the north-east of France, with Amiens the nearest ‘proper’ team of note but they are not a club with which I ever had an affinity.

The crest is the silhouette of a horse, for reasons that have passed into history

The approach here was similar to how Monaco used to have a white change kit and a red one.

In the parallel universe created, Longeau were fiercely proud of their colours – gainst blue teams, they could wear yellow and then against yellow teams the blue alternative was available.

Foolproof? Well, almost.

FC Zaandam (Netherlands)

Zaandam is the birthplace of Erwin and Ronald Koeman, Johnny Rep, Justin Kluivert and others, so it struck me as somewhere that was deserving of a major side – I didn’t know back then that AZ stood for Alkmaar Zaanstreek and the club is based there.

As with Longeau, I was trying to avoid the easy fall-back of white change kits for teams – in any case, navy, maroon and gold combine well in any combination.

The 1997-98 Aston Villa away design deserved more use, in our view – it seems Chile were meant to have it at France 98 – and serves as the home here, with the maroon away based on the 1998-99 Liverpool away. The 1999-2000 kits were based on Bolton Wanderers (home) and Villa/Liverpool (away).

In addition, this was an opportunity to create one of those little ‘coincidences’ I engineered – it just so happened that Zaandam were drawn with Longeau in the Uefa Cup draw I conducted.

Rather than creating a fourth kit for Longeau, the compromise reached was that both clubs should change for each leg.

That meant all-maroon v all-yellow in the Netherlands – but Longeau opting for a blue-yellow-blue mashup at home, kind of (perhaps not really) giving the effect of the hoops.

Royal Oostkamp (Belgium)

This was one of the last clubs created, in 1999-2000 (others came into fake being prior to then but have yet to feature here).

The inspiration was two-fold – partly the Bayern Munich European kit of the time and partly because we liked the Manchester United away kit and wanted to do an adidas version, but then the wine shade won out over navy.

We’re not even sure if Esso allow their logo to be rendered in monochrome rather than the blue, white and red – hopefully this won’t lead to a belated claim of breach of intellectual property.