This new series will hopefully be published on a Monday – this week was a bank holiday in Ireland, which is part of the excuse for the delayed premiere.
It is intended to act as a companion piece to the weekly Premier League roundup posted by our friend and Football Kit Podcast accomplice Gavin Hope on his site – we will look to take an interesting aspect from one of the PL kit matchups and compare and contrast with the other major leagues.
We mentioned in one of last week’s posts how Crystal Palace could conceivably mix and match their kits but, beyond necessary sock-changes, opt against doing so – with last weekend’s game at Nottingham Forest a perfect example of that.
Not that we have an issue with opposing teams wearing the same colour shorts – we don’t – wearing that white shirt with the blue home shorts would have provided a good aesthetic, we feel.
And, as it happens, the weekend provided three good examples of teams mixing up all-white or all-cream kits with darker shorts to avoid clashes with their hosts.
In the Bundesliga, Borussia Mönchengladbach used their black alternative home shorts at Werder Bremen – Mönchengladbach’s kits are always better with some green trim, for our money, but that’s a different issue – while Paris Saint-Germain and Atalanta wore their home shorts with away shirts against the similarly-clad Strasbourg and Como respectively.
In each case, the darker shorts worked well, in our view. Incidentally, regarding yesterday’s post lamenting the lack of colour options for Premier League numbering, the Strasbourg-PSG game showcased how Ligue 1 even offers clubs different styles – the hosts have a drop shadow and the visitors have inline trim, while there is also an outline option for French clubs.
One other notable mashup at the weekend came in La Liga.
While those shown above were positive changes, in each case the games could have gone ahead with little or no issue even if the visiting teams had used their kits in their default formats, this one showcased how changing shorts and socks can help to provide a lot more clarity between opposing sides.
Atlético Madrid have blue socks as well as shorts this season, which would not have worked away to Levante. However, by simply wearing their red backup sets, they created enough distinction to avoid having to wear a completely different kit.
Without wishing to be too smug about it, it backs up our assertion from a decade ago that Uefa were far too heavy-handed in insisting that both Atlético and Barcelona should wear their away kits when they met each other in the Champions League.
Love the start of this new series! It’s looking great already.
On a side note, I’ve noticed Barça is wearing red alternate shorts way more often than in previous seasons. They used them with the home kit in their La Liga away game against Espanyol in early January, and since then, they have worn the ‘Clásico’ shirt (a variant of the home kit, paired with red shorts and blue socks) for both Super Cup matches and every Copa del Rey game so far.
It looks like they might stick with it for the rest of the cup tournament (we’ll see it soon), which I’m pretty sure would be unprecedented in the club’s history. I wonder if a team has ever dedicated a special kit exclusively to domestic cup games before – I recall Borussia Dortmund but they usually wear theirs in European competitions too.