Fantasy Kit Friday – Hamburg in 1980s Hummel

A Southampton third kit might be a strange place to start a post like this, but – perhaps strangely, given their rivalry with Portsmouth, the late 1980s saw them in a blue, white and red ensemble on occasion.

With shorts-clashes prohibited by the Football League at the time, games at Arsenal in 1987-88 and 1988-89 saw the Saints use their black home shorts with the blue shirts and socks.

It was when watching highlights of the latter recently – the game where Paul Davis broke Glenn Cockerill’s jaw, with Jimmy Case exacting revenge on Davis when the rest of the stadium was watching Lee Dixon take a penalty – that I thought that their mashup would have made a good Hamburg away kit.

It’s one of those partnerships where you almost have a Madela Effect sense that it happen. While HSV are so closely associated with adidas, there was a period in the 1990s and 2000s where they carried other marques such as Uhlsport, Puma, Fila and Nike and Hummel’s chevrons would not have looked out of place.

We have gone back a decade from that peripatetic period, to the source Southampton material, but it would be cheating simply to do a crest- and sponsor-swap and, in any case, we wanted to apply some more creativity.

The home kit takes its cues from the 1988 Denmark kit, while the designs of the two alternative strips will be familiar to Tottenham Hotspur fans – the red one borrows the colour-scheme of the rarely worn third kit from the current season.

Feedback is always welcome, along with requests for future FKFs – comment below or message us on Twitter or Bluesky @museumofjerseys.