Umbro Blog

After the club revealed their new home and away shirts last week, we thought that you might want to take a closer look at the new Hearts kits for the forthcoming 2010/2011 season.

As they prepared to battle it out in the Scottish Premier League next season, Hearts will be taking to the field in these stylish shirts, Tailored by Umbro to give them the best possible advantage. The home shirt, in the club’s traditional claret and white with a striking penguin stripe in the centre, is a unique design in British league football this year.

With a stacked logo and Umbro diamond, the shirt maintains a clean, sharp look throughout, but with all the technical elements that top players expect. With a ribbed v-neck collar offering comfort, 100& polyester keeping the shirt lightweight and corded channel seams with a mesh vent providing ventilation, the kit will ensure that players and fans will look stylish but can concentrate on the action.

For their away shirt, Hearts have chosen sharp sky blue and white stripes, complete with a smart, classic-style collar and ergonomically-shaped single button. With a raglan sleeve providing increased comfort, the printed stripe detail is set off by the Umbro diamond in the club’s claret home colour, ensuring that a little bit of home travels with the club wherever they go!

The attention to detail in the new Tailored kits continues through into the shorts, which feature a wide panel mirroring the colours of the shirt, and continued down into the socks. Altogether, it all adds up into a kit that Hearts fans and players can be proud of as they aim for SPL success this season.

Cameroon by Vic_Beat

With the action in South Africa over it is time to announce the winners of our Spirit of South Africa competition.  We have had over a thousand entries and the standard of photography has been excellent.  You can check out all of the pictures over on the Flickr group here.  Our Umbro photographer in South Africa, Stanley Lumax has judged the competition for us.  Congratulations to Viv_Beat (picture above) who wins the opportunity to watch the England Team train and then be Umbro’s official photographer at Wembley for the England versus Bulgaria Euro qualifier with a brand new Sony NEX 5.  Stanley has also selected 4 pictures as runners up who will receive some Umbro goodies.  Here is what Stanley had to say:

There were a lot of great photos taken for this contest. What separated these five from the rest is the overall emotion and story-telling I felt when I saw them. Having actually taken a lot of these shots at the World Cup, I appreciate the process of looking for interesting shots, and actually positioning yourself at unique angles so that you don’t get the same shot that everyone else has. Even having your camera set and anticipating that someone will do something worth capturing. It is not as easy as it looks, and it is a tiresome process to do it for 90 minutes of a game. Everyone who participated should be congratulated.

I love the Cameroon pic by Vic_Beat because of the intensity and solitude depicted. The concentration in his face is as though he is on the field and ready to do battle.Most photos you see of fans with their faces painted are playful and happy. This one is intense.

This photo communicates the helplessness and faith of being a fan. Knowing that there is nothing you can do but believe in your team. Its definitely a religious experience.

The collective number of fans was quite impressive. Depending on what team you were cheering for, it could give you a feeling of invincibility or a feeling of enormous obstacles.

There was something interesting about seeing the diversity of fans supporting Ghana. Photos like this one help communicate to people who were not there that the reality is there is a variety of nationalities in Africa and the support of African countries as a whole was strong, no matter which country it was. A win was for the continent.

The Flags help give the World Cup color and energy. It helped strangers identify wether someone was a friend or foe, and gave a reason to strike up conversations with people no matter where they were from geographically.

Click the image to enlarge.

Less than an hour before kick off, and we thought it’d be a good idea to show the England boys exactly how they got to South Africa, goal by goal, in a bid to inspire them against the USA tonight. To do so, we’ve collaborated with top graphic artist Michael Deal, who’s taken the raw data of the goals England scored and importantly, where they scored them, and turned it into these cracking visuals. Lets hope that we see plenty of similar action tonight!

We know you’ve been enjoying everything that we’ve revealed about the World Champions Collection so far, so we thought you might like to see these pictures of our seven girls from the seven countries involved. You can see them all in the gallery above, or you can see them individually by clicking on the links here:

Abbey Clancy – England

Alice Bregoli – Italy

Charlene Suric – France

Julia Goedicke – Germany

Luli Fernanez – Argentina

Susana Werner – Brazil

Zaira Nara – Uruguay

A few people have been asking about this jacket since it was debuted last night by Robbie Williams and his band during Sport Relief – there’s a brief glimpse of it here on the Sport Relief site. With that in mind, we thought we’d give you chance to admire it in all its glory here, before it’s released later this year ahead of the big tournament in South Africa. It’s inspired by the classic jacket worn by England’s World Cup winning manager Sir Alf Ramsey during his spell in the top job. Like the new England Away shirt, the Ramsey is inspired by the past, but it’s crafted from the most modern, technologically advanced materials, and designed by our creative consultant Aitor Throup.

This is only a sneak peak, as the jacket won’t be available to buy until the summer – keep an eye on the blog for more info on where you can get your hands on one!

The name Garrincha probably isn’t as well known amongst modern football fans as it should be – this is, after all, a player regarded as Brazil’s second greatest ever, who played a massive part in his country’s World Cup victories in 1958 and 1962. A giant on the pitch – he’s seen as simply the greatest dribbler of the ball ever seen – Garrincha is also famous for his wild, off the field antics. It’s no surprise then that his story has inspired a number of books and films in his homeland, with Garrincha – Estrela Solitaria the latest movie to make a big mark over in Brazil.

That film has come to our attention here at Umbro mainly thanks to the soundtrack, a jazzy samba collection that’s currently working as a great musical accompaniment to our work as we move out of winter and start to look towards summer – and the World Cup. The very kind folks at Far Out Recordings, the Brazilian music specialists who are releasing the record over here, have allowed us to stream a song from the album exclusively here on the Umbro blog. You can listen to ‘Abertura’, the opening track from the album which has been put together by jazz artist Leo Gandelman, on the link below. If you like it, you can find out more over at the Far Out website, as well as details on more samba-fuelled releases that they’ve also got planned. They’re also planning on screening Garrincha – Estrela Solitaria here in the UK later this year, so keep your eyes on their site if you’d like to see the film and learn more about this somewhat overlooked footballing icon.

01 Abertura

It started with a Tweet. Back in September, Darren Bent spotted that Umbro were running a competition for people to design their own Speciali boot outsole, and wanted to get involved.  James Else kindly designed some boots for Darren using our customisation tool on umbro.com

On Twitter, DBTheTruth then tweeted “I want this on the bottom of my boot safc fans will know why“  So our designers got down to work and designed some options. 

Darren then put these to the public vote and what you see here is the end result!  The white/black/gold boots are the latest colourway for the Speciali due to go on sale in the UK on February 1st.  You can learn more about the Speciali boots over on umbro.com.   

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The Decade Of Kits took a brief international break yesterday, but it’s back today with another strong line-up. Take a look through the kits above, expertly captured by John Devlin, and let us know which one you think is the finest. If you need to jog your memory about what exactly happened that season, here’s a quick recap of the big events in football during 2004-05.

The biggest result of this season was probably Liverpool’s famous Champions League win in Istanbul, while back in the Premiership Chelsea secured their first title in fifty years. The Londoners also won the Carling Cup, while Arsenal won the FA Cup, beating Manchester United in the final on penalties. Everton finished in the Top 4 above their city neighbours, the last time a team outside of Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United did so.

At the other end of the table, Crystal Palace, Norwich and Southampton dropped out of the top flight, and none of the three have since returned. Replacing them from the newly-named Championship were Sunderland, Wigan Athletic and West Ham, who beat Preston North End in the play-off final.

England began their campaign for the 2006 World Cup in this season, in a group that contained British neighbours Wales and Northern Ireland. The campaign went well, with five wins and a draw from their six games so far.

The biggest transfer this season was Wayne Rooney’s £27million move to Manchester United from Everton. It was a season for big money moves – Didier Drogba joined Chelsea for £24million, while Michael Owen moved to Real Madrid for £17million.

Sponsoring a taxi is one thing, but sponsorship on shirts can be quite a contentious issue for fans – many would probably admire the route that Barcelona and Sheffield Wednesday have gone down by featuring a charity on their shirts, but the money that a sponsor brings into the club is probably quite handy in keeping a lot of clubs afloat.

Last weekend, Lyon went down an interesting route by featuring a local rapper on their shirts. Kool Shen, who handily has a new album in the shops, featured on the shirts during the French club’s massive game against Marseille, an event which was captured over at Football Shirt Culture. I wonder if this unusual step had any influence on the match, which ended up a 5-5 thriller? This isn’t the first time music and football shirts have come together though – Clydebank and Wet Wet Wet came together in the 1990s, as did Brighton and Fatboy Slim’s record label, Skint. Any local bands you’d like to see on the front of your team’s shirt?

Tomorrow’s World Cup Playoffs are the biggest football matches to look forward to over the weekend, with a lot of the attention focused on the Ireland versus France match. Relations between the two have been a bit frosty since Raymond Domenech called Ireland ‘England’s B Team.’ Thankfully things haven’t escalated any further, but this impressively official-looking sequence of letters from the Irish Soccer Insider images the trouble that might be stirred up if French President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to attend tomorrow’s match.

Of course, England are also playing tomorrow, in a friendly against Brazil, in Qatar. Non-competitive matches can often be a non-event, but at least this match might provide an insight into how England cope against a top team, whilst also giving players such as Darren Bent a chance to stake a claim for South Africa (former manager Alan Curbishley talks up DB’s chances on the BBC website here). Talking of the World Cup, Pelé has normally cursed England’s chances by now by saying that he thinks we can win it. Instead, Brazil’s latest football hero Kaka has done it instead in this interview with The Guardian, proclaiming that he has ‘no doubt that England can win the World Cup.’ That’s our chances blown then!

Last week, we mentioned some of the footballers that are regular on Twitter (handily compiled in a list here), but there’s a new addition who has to get a special mention. Jozy Altidore, currently playing at Hull City, is a regular Tweeter, particularly about adjusting to life in England. He recently posted this video of what happened when he encountered a particularly English problem – sheep on a country road.

Finally, credit should go to Hellowearefootball, the Flickr user who captured that very British-looking taxi in their native Bilbao. Cracking pic!

Name: Stephen

How long have you been at Umbro?

Just over 3 months officially, but I was working for about 6 weeks before that on various freelance bits and bobs for Umbro.

What do you do at Umbro?

I’m a bit complicated… I manage the design space on Dale St, which is split into 3 sections; The design studio, where we design all of Umbro Sportwear apparel. An exhibition space where we curate all things football. And the exchange, where we will sell the hard to find, limited edition and the best of Umbro product. But I’m also a designer. I design the majority of graphics for Umbro Sportswear, and I design apparel for the premium commercial sector. I also answer the phone.

What would other people say you did ?

Eat sandwiches

Where do you see Umbro going?

As the leader in British sportswear and the pinnacle brand in football.

Favourite Umbro garment?

My first football kit, the 1988-1990 Chelsea away kit… mint green. Matt and shine jacquard shorts with tonal grey rectangles… Dope.

Least favourite Umbro garment?

Anything with the laced up collar… Yuk!

What’s your most memorable football experience?

Accidentally on purpose kicking a lad in the shin, and his mum running on the pitch chasing me down to slap me round the head… Life changing experience.

What were you doing before Umbro?

I worked for Magma Design Ltd. designing and managing their t-shirt and tote bag range. And sold my skills to whoever would take them…

What inspires you?

Coffee and cigarettes.

Did you got to design school?

Nope, self edumacated.