Spirit of Football

The football shirt is of iconic significance, defining a club’s visual identity through its role as sporting uniform and fan identifier, providing a canvas for commercial interactions and increasingly acting as the focus of nostalgia and collector culture. In this article we focus on the football shirt’s extension from sportswear to a replica product worn as cross-generational leisurewear. We first consider how a replica’s authenticity, its principal attribute, exists in objective, constructive and existential contexts. We then demonstrate how the subsequent focus of kit manufacturers and clubs on satisfying these differing interpretations of authenticity has influenced football shirt design. For two decades, replica kits were marketed as sportswear to children, with attempts to enhance the football shirt’s authenticity through distinctiveness and exclusivity leading to copyrighted designs, manufacturer’s logos and increased patterning. However, as the replica football shirt became adult leisurewear, the changing customer base led to retrospective and recycled shirt designs proclaiming a club’s distinct identity through its heritage, fulfilling fans’ nostalgic interpretations of a club’s authentic kit, and reflecting fans’ use of replica shirts to display their authenticity as a genuine fan. These ideals have also inspired a parallel retro-replica industry and, we argue, caused stagnation in the development of the aesthetic elements of contemporary kit design, which had previously demonstrated innovation interspersed with periods of consolidation, but had taken few retrospective turns. Genuine innovation in football shirt design has increasingly become restricted to technological advances and marketing strategies.

DOO DOO DOO UNION! pic.twitter.com/uygh0Q9MJX

— 1. FC Union Berlin (@fcunion_en) May 27, 2019

Ljubav prema klubu ne zna za godine... Upoznajte 83-godišnjeg Cveleta Ofkovca, koji ne propušta nijedan meč beogradskih plavo-belih  pic.twitter.com/dvLQHkaXB5

— BBC NEWS na srpskom (@bbcnasrpskom) June 2, 2019

Leaked promotional video of Arsenal’s new home kit, manufactured by Adidas, for the 2019/20 season. pic.twitter.com/6ZUwlZxPB0

— P (@Prats_afc_) June 27, 2019

Looking ahead to tomorrow and the announcing of our new signing! @mansfieldtownfc pic.twitter.com/Wj2lj6i7Ag

— Carolyn Radford (@CarolynRadford) June 30, 2019

Keepy Uppy. Redcar Beach, Teesside, early 90s.

Photo submitted to our People’s Archive project by Mark Wall.

Mark: “This picture was taken by my dad in the early 90s. Alone on a bleak looking Redcar beach playing keepy up with a football just above my head, the steelworks kicking out god knows what in the background. It feels like perfect image for growing up on Teesside in the 80s/90s. The soon-to-be-broken industrial backbone intersecting with the faded seaside scene of Redcar beach, juxtaposed with the focus, concentration and naivety of an 11 year old unaware of any of that!”

For once the Daily Mail is right.

We'll take on the bad owners and billionaires like Mike Ashley, we'll give supporters a say over how their club is run and we'll make sure that the Premier League's riches are invested in grassroots football in our communities. pic.twitter.com/KfCtLLFNRr

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) October 6, 2019