Liverpool and Arsenal meet at Anfield on Sunday afternoon, with top spot in the Premier League up for grabs as last season’s champions and runners-up go head-to-head.
Arsenal will be in their off-white and burgundy third kit for the second time in three league games in this nascent season – we’d have preferred change shorts but, if the famously pernickety Uefa didn’t insist on that for the 2008 Champions League quarter-final second leg, it was unlikely to happen voluntarily.
Beyond the colours, the kits today are of note because for the first time since 1994, the clubs face each other with both wearing adidas.
It’s just over 39 years to the day – August 30, 1986 – since the first time they did so, with Arsenal having followed Liverpool’s 1985 lead in switching from Umbro. It’s also worth noting that, in an era where we have adidas Equipment and trefoil logos appearing on the same pitch, such a match-up happened in 1991-92 and 1992-93, with the Reds having taken the Equipment plunge before the Gunners.
By March of 1994, when Arsenal hosted Liverpool in the Premiership, it was already known that they would be switching to Nike for the following season.
Two decades with the American firm would follow and then five seasons with Puma before the return to adidas in 2019. Liverpool stayed with the German firm two years longer before moving to Reebok; there would be a reunion with adidas from 2006-12 and then dalliances with Warrior, New Balance and Nike prior to this summer’s third spell in three stripes.
That 1993-94 meeting at Highbury had a couple of items of interest from a sartorial point of view.
There was another logo mismatch – Arsenal in the adidas Equipment kit launched in 1992, while Liverpool wore the new third kit that they had first worn against Sheffield United on Boxing Day, which only featured the wordmark.
Their goalkeeper David James had the same shirts design as his namesake David in the other goal but, in what was a one-off occurrence, he wore the black third shorts and socks rather than the default goalkeeper items.
From an Arsenal point of view, the intrigue was on the backs of the shirts.
Four days previously, when they hosted Manchester United, they piloted a new experiment where they played in 1-11 but with names on the back.
Of their starting 11, Seaman, Lee Dixon, Ian Wright and Paul Merson – who scored the only goal – wore their squad numbers, while two other players had 1-11 squad numbers but wore different ones: Andy Linighan ceded 5 to Steve Bould and wore 6 while Kevin Campbell wore 9 while John Jensen had 7, Campbell’s allocated digit.
The scheme was tried as a response to growing concerns about high squad numbers; Arsenal went 1-11 for their last six home league games but it was decided not to advance the plan for 1994-95, with the cost of having multiple versions of the same number cited as a factor.
We shall look at it in greater detail in the Arsenal instalment of the 1993-94 squad numbers series.
