As our ongoing poll to find your favourite kit of the decade has shown, football shirt design has changed considerably over the past ten years. No one knows this better than Umbro’s senior designer David Blanch, who joined the company exactly ten years ago, and has played a major role in developing Umbro’s shirt designs ever since. Here, he looks back at the last decade of kits and how they’ve shaped the shirts of the future.
The iconic kits
“I’ve been really fortunate because I came into Umbro ten years ago. It was my anniversary just last month. I remember when I first came here, and the first kits that I did were Celtic, Manchester United and England. Some pretty big clubs! And the England one really set the lead – it was the shirt with the red stripe through it. It ended up being really culturally significant, and we really wanted to introduce a sense of ‘Englishness’ into it. The other big thing with that shirt was that it introduced an element of 3D – before that, the shirts were all flat, tee-shaped shirts with changing necklines, and some graphics and colours. That England kit in particular, when you look at it, you’ll see that the style lines move all round the body. That set a whole new tone for what football kits were all about, and all the other manufacturers started looking at what we were up to, and thinking about shirts more three dimensionally.”
Innovation
“The Noughties did create a lot of innovative thinking. We were the first brand to integrate the little hologram sticker into the kit, and it originally was inspired by credit cards. I was asked when I joined to put a label on the shirt to show that it was authentic, and I was thinking ‘what out there in the world says security?’ And I thought that the logo on your credit card feels really secure. So we spend ages trying to work out how we could put this on a shirt so it wouldn’t get damaged or wash off. It’s small things like that seem really innovative. It actually seems clumsy now, but at the time it seemed amazing.”
Reversing trends
“I loved being involved with the world’s first reversible football kit, which we did with Manchester United. That was amazing. It was gold on one side and white on the other. The players didn’t have two layers because it would’ve been too heavy for them, but the fans could buy this reversible shirt. And that made me think, ‘what if the England shirt could be reversible, but it could be one layer of fabric instead of two?’ And I remember people saying there’s no way we could do that, but we worked on it in our innovations department, and created this fabric that was red on one side and blue on the other, so as a supporter you could wear the kit or turn it inside out and have a different shirt. At the time, I remember there was a problem with people not being allowed in pubs if they were wearing football shirts, so you could turn it inside out and the crest wouldn’t be there any more, and you could go straight into the pub!”
Making shirts special
“The thing that didn’t change and still hasn’t changed to me is making the kit feel special. That’s where I think Umbro differs from a lot of other brands – how does it feel not just when you wear it, but when you own it? There’s that sense of special occasion about our shirts. When I first started looking at football shirts, I thought that they looked good, but they didn’t feel special enough. So we spent a long time just looking at the fabric, trying to make it softer, right up until this decade when we found a new way to introduce cotton into the garment. We had a lot of people that would say that they loved the design of the shirts, but they wanted them to feel like the old retro shirts. Retro is the last thing Umbro want to do, because that’s when you look backwards and you haven’t done anything clever with it. For me, Umbro should always look at what’s happened in the past, but use it to catapult you into the future.”
A change in direction
“Football needed more than just technical fabric, it’s about so much more than performance. We decided that we wanted to make people feel good in a garment, so that’s why we’ve ended up with the idea of tailoring. Tailors make you feel good, so we wanted to take that feeling, and put it into a football kit. That’s the big shift for the new decade. A lot of shirts today, they’re so busy and cluttered, that the players are competing to look good in them. By taking it right down to a pure design, you get a real connection with the player. If you use an iPod as an example, there’s a million pieces of technology in there, but you love the look of it, it’s got a real personality to it. The England shirt is the same; it’s got more technology than they ever did, but it’s not just about that, it’s about how it makes you feel. If you’re a brilliant player, this kit is going to make you look great.”
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