While Fulham spent just three seasons with Puma, it is a partnership that remains memorable.
After six seasons with adidas, the west London club made the switch in the summer of 2003 and the first home strip of the new partnership was certainly noteworthy – one sleeve was black, in a raglan style, while the other was white, in the traditional armscye format.
It’s a set-up that would not be allowed by Uefa nowadays and so a club would be unlikely to tempt fate by developing such a kit for domestic use if it had to be greatly modified for Europe.
The shorts continued the aymmetrical feel with red and white trim while the socks were constructed in such a way that the backs looked back rather than white.
The second and third kits were mirror images of each other, black with red trim and red with black trim respectively.
While some of us might have bristled at the fact that this meant the home and away shorts were slightly different black sets – or the black numbers on the latter – the use of traditional club colours was to be applauded and that in turn gave rise to a number of mashups.
The third kit only appeared once all season in its default format, away to Newcastle United – when the Magpies visited Loftus Road (where Fulham were still playing home games as Craven Cottage was being redeveloped), their choice of silver was not deemed to be sufficiently diffierent to white and so Fulham wore their black away. However, the red shorts and socks would receive good exposure with the white and black shirts.
The black away socks were generally called upon when socks-clashes arose but, at West Ham United in February, they appeared in a Liverpool-like white-black-red combination.
That game at Upton Park came just three days after they had gone white-red-red at Wolverhampton Wanderers, while the first mix-and-match of the season had come away to Tottenham Hotspur at the end of August – the red third shirts with the black shirts and socks.
Most often, goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar was seen in a green shirt with black sleeves – when required to change, grey was the choice.
Playing in the top flight for the third straight season, Fulham would go on to record a ninth-placed finish, bettering the two previous campaigns.
In 2001-02, the Fulham away had been red and black stripes while 2002-03 saw a reversal of the home kit, black-white-black – the coming 2004-05 would see a move away from the familiar to a sky-blue offering, which received its premiere in the final home game, against Arsenal.
Using the new Puma design that would be very popular at Euro 2004, it featured a sleeve patch marking the club’s 125th anniversary and it was joined by a complementary red goalkeeper kit, as classic of the ‘would have made a lovely away itself’ genre.
