NOWADAYS, so much of a football club’s identity is bound up in its kit. Red or blue? Plain or patterned? Vertical or horizontal stripes? Replica kits are ubiquitous, from the stands of the Premier League to the backstreets of any major city, anywhere in the world. As a symbol of identity, the football kit has become a language that marries the global with the fiercely parochial.
Yet as Middlesbrough club author, Anthony Vickers, explains in his latest book, ‘Threads of History’, that hasn’t always been the case. Think of Middlesbrough’s home strip now, and you conjure up an image of a red shirt with some form of white band. Yet in the 1890s, Boro played in blue and white stripes. Even as recently as the early 1930s, they were playing in white shirts and blue shorts. Back then, a football kit was a matter of practical necessity rather than a symbol of communal belonging.
“In the early years of our football clubs, everything was up for grabs,” explained Vickers, who covered Middlesbrough for years as a writer at the Evening Gazette before taking up a job with the club. “There were mergers, changes of names, so Middlesbrough had five or six different kits over the years before they eventually settled on red.
“In the very early years, clubs that were edging away from cricket whites tended to adopt hoops because they were a public-school sportswear staple, available in lots of different colours. The switch to red first came about in 1901, and it was the 21st item on the agenda of a committee meeting at Middlesbrough’s Linthorpe Road Ground. For a long time after that though, the kit remained a very practical cost for the football club rather than anything grander.
“That’s why in the period of economic hardship between the wars, the kit didn’t change for ten or 15 years. Players would play in the same kit season after season – you’d be charged extra just to have an extra button on, so they remained very plain. Then for three or four years after the Second World War, clubs would be playing in anything they had left over or even occasionally a kit they were able to borrow.”
Vickers identifies the 1960s as the period when definitive kits began to emerge that were readily identifiable with specific clubs, although even at that stage, most teams would still not have had the club badge on their shirt.
By the 1970s, clubs were playing in kits that tended to closely resemble the shirts that same team will be playing in today, and there was the first sign of a second-hand replica market starting to emerge. Even then, though, the notion of a football top as an adult fashion statement would have been laughable.
“It wasn’t really until the 1990s that you started seeing adults wearing replica kits,” said Vickers. “You started seeing children wearing them in the 1980s, but the notion that adults might turn up to a game in the 80s wearing a replica shirt just wasn’t part of the football culture. If nothing else, you wanted to hide your club affiliation to make sure you didn’t get your head kicked in.”
The 1990s, an era of Gazza’s tears, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and the advent of the Premier League, transformed English football, and Boro were ahead of the curve when replica kits began to become a mass retail opportunity.
“After liquidation, Boro didn’t have any money,” said Vickers. “Their existing kit deal with Hummell had run out, but they actually started the first season after liquidation wearing the previous season’s kit, even though the sponsorship and manufacturing deals had both run out.
“Then, a man walked into the small club shop at Ayresome Park, and said, ‘Do you want me to make you some shirts?’ He was the husband of a woman who ran a rag-trade operation in Linthorpe Village. She mainly made blouses for M&S, but the Lycra boom, with home exercise and all of that, meant she had the machinery to be able to deal with polyester, which was quite specialist at the time.
“Anyway, one day, he turned up back at the club with a full set of kit that is now regarded as arguably the most iconic in Middlesbrough’s history. It was the Dickens-sponsored one, and because the club started to take off, kids and teenagers suddenly started turning up at the club shop wanting one of these shirts. For the first time, Boro started selling adult replicas, and when they produced a one-off Wembley special for the ZDS Cup final in March 1990, it did really well.
“A movement was in motion that wasn’t going to stop. In their last season at Ayresome Park, Boro sold 10,000 replicas. In the first season at the Riverside, that figure was up to 25,000.”
Today, kit launches are massive events, with huge social media campaigns and fans queueing from the early hours to be one of the first to get their hands on the ‘new shirt’. The very notion of what a football kit is for has fundamentally changed.
“If you look at Middlesbrough – and I think this rings true of most small towns – then the football club is the biggest cultural identifier,” said Vickers. “The country is full of one-club towns – certainly Middlesbrough Football Club is the dominant cultural presence on Teesside – and the one thing people recognise about Middlesbrough up and down the country is the football shirt. There’s a level of pride and identity that goes with that. It’s why you’ll see Middlesbrough shirts worn everywhere now. It says something about who we are.”
* ‘Threads of History: The Story of the Middlesbrough Shirt’ is on sale now, available at the Middlesbrough club shop or online at www.mfcofficialdirect.co.uk.
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