We may be experts on all things football here at Umbro, but we have other interests as well – when there’s no matches on the telly, we’ve been known to watch something else, and we need something to listen to on the way to the game!

As it’s the time of year when everyone is coming up with their ‘best ofs’, we thought we’d get involved as well and offer a bit of insight into what everyone here at Umbro gets up to, as well as some of our favourite football moments from 2010. Feel free to agree or disagree with us by entering your comments at the bottom of the page!

Music

A real mixed bag of responses from the Umbro team when asked for their albums of the year, but because Tom and I run the blog, our choice is going to get the award: congratulations then to I Am Kloot, whose album ‘The Sky At Night’ is picked as our favourite of 2010. Second place must go to Orphan Boy’s ‘Passion, Pain & Loyalty’, while elsewhere Umbro’s staff picked out Eminem’s ‘Recovery’, Hed Candi Ibiza 2010, LCD Soundsystem’s ‘This Is Happening’, Delorean’s ‘Subiza’, Paul Weller’s ‘Wake Up The Nation’, Beach House’s ‘Teen Dream’, Onra’s ‘Long Distance’, Chromeo’s ‘Business Casual,’ Wooden Shjips’ ‘Vol. 2′, Interpol’s ‘Interpol’, Aloe Blacc’s ‘Good Things’, Take That’s ‘Progress’ and Plan B’s ‘The Defamation Of Strickland Banks’. Quite a mix!

It’s the same with song of the year – no clear winner, but votes for Orphan Boy’s ‘Popsong’, Arcade Fire’s ‘We Used To Wait’, The National’s ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’, Aloe Blacc’s ‘I Need A Dollar’, Mark Ronson’s ‘Bang Bang Bang’, Caribou’s ‘Odessa’… plus various songs from the Plan B album, so we’ll give him the award despite the fact three different songs were chosen!

Film of 2010 is a lot easier to work out, with a clear winner being the mindbending mystery thriller Inception starring Leonardo Di Caprio. It didn’t get all the votes though – The Social Network, Iron Man 2, Four Lions, Toy Story 3, Salt, Kick Ass and Shutter Island all got a shout from various people within Umbro Towers.

If you exclude Match Of The Day and other sporting events from the TV show of the year category, there’s some impressive levels of taste with Umbro’s choices. Top of the pile is Mad Men, with other people picking out Peep Show, Psychoville, Luther, Misfits, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad and Eastbound & Down – which tells you that we either want a laugh or a serious show about zombies, drug dealers or criminals when we get out of work in the evening, not sure what that tells you about us!

Favourite books of the year was a problem last year when we did this survey last year, and you can tell people have struggled again this time around – some of the suggestions included the Panini World Cup sticker album, the TV Guide and my personal favourite, ‘Pro HTML5 Programming’ by Peter Lubbers, Brian Albers, and Frank Salim (thanks Tom). Thankfully, there are some more cultured types here at Umbro, with Keith Richards’ ‘Life’, Colin Bateman’s ‘The Day Of The Jack Russell’, Patrick Neate’s ‘The London Pigeon Wars’, The Travel Diaries Of Karl Pilkington, Tom McCarthy’s ‘C’, Rusty Young’s ‘Marching Powder, Helen Simpson’s ‘Inflight Entertainment’ and Audrey Niffenegger’s ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’ getting picked out. Once again abusing my editorial position, I’m going to stick my favourite in as the winner, so the award goes to Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’.

Finally, we returned to our natural home with some questions about football. Easy you’d think, and the winner certainly was: a landslide victory for the Barcelona and Argentina man, Mr. Messi. Elsewhere, Glentoran’s Matty Burrows got a couple of votes for his wonder goal, while big names like Andy Carroll, Gazza, Joe Hart, Iniesta, Xavi and Jon Parkin all got a vote or two. (Best recount those votes for Parkin….)

It was finest footballing moment that really brought out the tribalism amongst the Umbro staff though. Rather than trying to pick out a winner, I’ll just select a few choice highlights to show how cruel some of the people here can be…

“Ghana in the World Cup”

“Barca 5 Real Madrid 0″

“Sam Allardyce getting sacked from Blackburn”

“The Stjarnan toilet celebration”

“Coaching 28 u8′s every Saturday morning”

“Crystal Palace drawing with Sheff Weds. 2nd
May”

“Everytime Germany played Brazilian Football at the World Cup – but especially when Germany beat England” – guess where that particular member of staff hails from!

What exactly is a live design competition? That’s the question we asked when we first heard about Cut & Paste, the London leg of which took place in Shoreditch last week. Luckily, one of Umbro’s graphic designers was chosen to take part in the final, so he’s been able to give us the lowdown on this fascinating event that’s now taking place all over the world.

Graeme Peacock was chosen from the many entries put forward for the London Cut & Paste, and last Thursday he travelled down to the final after submitting his portfolio and impressing at a preliminary round. So what exactly is a live design competition?

“It’s exactly as it sounds!” Graeme explained. “Four people are given a brief and have 15 minutes to come up with a design that fits the bill. You have to do it in front of a big crowd, with music being played, and with everyone following everything on massive screens. It’s a pretty strange experience!”

So, Graeme stepped up to the plate at Shoreditch Village Underground last week, and given a brief of using a tattoo, a photograph and a paradox, came up with the image at the top of the page. He was entering the 2D competition (there’s also a 3D and motion graphics round) and his design was chosen as one of the four best, meaning he made it through to the final round.

In the next round, the brief was around Confucious (a Chinese philosopher), and Graeme came up with the above image in his allotted 15 minutes. It wasn’t enough to see him chosen as the overall winner unfortunately, but he’s happy with his Cut & Paste experience.

“I’m a bit gutted that I didn’t win the trip to New York which was the overall prize, but I did enjoy the whole experience,” said Graeme. “I’d probably do it again, everyone else except me had practised this time around so maybe next time I’ll do the same!”

Congratulations to Graeme on his success at Cut & Paste, and to everyone who took part. For more information on the whole worldwide live design competition thing, take a look at the Cut & Paste website.

We’re obviously a bit biased, but we think Umbro’s a pretty good place to work. If you’re thinking along the same lines, we’ve got a new addition to our website that you might want to take a peek at. We’re now listing all our current vacancies at Umbro.com/jobs, so you can browse and apply for any of the jobs going here at Umbro there and then.

At the moment we’ve got a few interesting jobs available, including a PR Executive role where you’d find yourself working alongside our talented, handsome but humble blog team – take a look at the site now if you think you’ve got what we’re looking for…

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that a lot of us here at Umbro enjoy a game of football every now and then, what will us being fanatical about the sport. We’ve also got a lot of ladies working for us, in every department here at Umbro House. They’ve never been included in the action on the pitch though – until now.

Recently, the ladies here at Umbro have looked into setting up their own football team, and organised a series of training sessions to get themselves up to speed. To celebrate their efforts, and to get some insight into what its like to start off in football from scratch, we’ve signed up one of the squad to write some reports. Mandy Jones, our voice from inside the Umbro’s ladies team, gives us an idea of why she’s chosen to spend her Tuesday evenings running around wet and windy Stockport:

“The e-mail came round asking if anyone was interested, and fitness, fun, competitive spirit and networking motivated me into joining up. As well as getting more involved in football banter with my 8 year old son. He joined his first proper league team this year and comes back filthy every Saturday morning but with a big smile on both his and his Dad’s face.

After the first training session I realised it was fantastic way to keep fit without realising it as we are all too involved in the exercises to worry about being out of breath. With our coach encouraging us to increase our fitness levels the team ethic has spilled into the rest of the week with regular runs with fellow player/work colleagues at lunchtime and after work.

We started well with 18 signing up as interested and 16 attending the first session. Attendance has gradually gone down hill and for the last few weeks have had a core of 8 or 9 players that regularly attend. A cross section of the business have signed up from Product, Marketing, Supply Chain, Finance and Teamwear which means we have met and made friends with people we have rarely bumped into before.

As the weeks have gone on we are learning dribbling skills, dodging tactics – step overs, side moves, pretend kicks with a reverse (sure there a more technical name for some of these moves) but of course forget all of when in a game situation. The coach has a great sense of humour with lots of banter about the maleness of the game with shouts such as ‘Man on’. We did wonder whether to change it to ‘lady on’ but just decided to stick with standard ‘man on’. I think he finds our girly giggles and cowardliness towards the ball (especially at the penalty shoot outs) amusing.

He did despair when a ‘goalie’ covered their eyes with fear as the ball hurtled towards them. Think that was in Week 1 and we have got a bit braver since!

We have just 4 more training sessions to fine tune these skills before we look for a league to join up to – scary!!

Every week I come home my 8 year old son is very keen to hear what I have learnt and it is total role reversal from him coming home from school telling what he has learnt! For once he has the upper hand with more experience, skill and speed than me. Well he has a 4 year head start!”

Thanks to Mandy for giving us an insight into the team – we’ll be following the ladies’ team as they aim for their first competitive match.

Climbing a mountain would be enough of a test for most of us, but a hardy bunch from here at Umbro recently went even bigger in aid of charity. Nine hardy souls (pictured above with along with their very helpful drivers) pulled off a mountainous feat by scaling Britain’s three highest peaks in less than 24 hours, an amazing achievement that we wanted to share with you.

Our group of intrepid adventurers set themselves this mammoth challenge in order raise money for The Christie, a charity that’s close to many of our hearts here in Manchester for the work it does in helping cancer sufferers.

The challenge was to scale Ben Nevis in Scotland, Scarfeld Pike in the Lake District and Snowdon in Wales in less than a full day, and the nine-strong team have spent weeks in the gym preparing for the effort. All the hard work obviously paid off, as the team made it with time to spare, climbing all three in the space of 22 hours and 45 minutes. Although tired and a little sore, all the team escaped without any terrible injuries, and are now basking in the acclaim of their co-workers, so we thought we’d big them up in cyber-space as well!

Congratulations again to all the team, who have raised a whopping £22,000 and counting so far from their efforts. Here’s a video they’ve put together, complete with a suitably epic soundtrack, showcasing their uphill struggle:

Ever gone to a party and met someone wearing the exact same outfit? Embarrassing, isn’t? It could be worse though – here at Umbro House, we’re proud of the stuff we make, and plenty of us wear it to work. Occasionally though, some of us end up looking like identical twins when we turn up to work wearing the same shirts. This used to go un-noticed, but we’ve decided to reveal these moments of double trouble by picturing them here on the blog. Check out these moments of sartorial terror that we’ve had over the past couple of weeks, and keep your eyes peeled for more in the future. Only by highlighting these terrible occurances can we ensure that they never happen again.

If you spot any of your own moments of doubled-up dressing while you’re out and about, grab a picture and send them in to us at blog@umbro.com, and we’ll make sure the whole world can see!

Proof that we’re all still hard at work here at Umbro Towers…

You might think that all of us here at Umbro eat, sleep and drink football – and you’d be right. However, when we’re not debating whether Liverpool have turned a corner or if Newcastle are going to run away with the Championship, we do have an interest in other things. Here’s some of the favourite things of 2009 picked by Umbro’s staff: music, films, television, books, and our top footballing moments….

Music

There was a real range of musical styles represented by Umbro’s staff, but one record clearly got more votes than any other: Kasabian’s West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. The Leicester band’s psychedelic third album was a clear winner, with its closest rival (Empire Of The Sun’s self-titled LP) mustering just two votes. Other records suggested by the Umbro gang included:

Wild Beasts’ Two Dancers, Imelda May’s Love Tattoo, Gallow’s Grey Britain, Vitalic’s Flashmob, Manic Street Preachers’ Journal For Plague Lovers, British Sea Power’s Man of Aran, Take That’s The Circus, U2′s No Line On The Horizon, La Roux’s self-titled album, The Silversun Pickups’ Swoon, XX by The XX and Blakroc’s rap-rock collaboration.

For our favourite tracks of the year, there was no clear winner, with a wide range of tracks picked out. Highlights are:

Uprising by Muse, In For The Kill (Skream remix) by La Roux, Black Eyes by Gallows, Rabbit Heart by Florence & The Machine, My Girls by Animal Collective, She Wolf by Shakira, Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear and Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal.You can imagine the fights we have over the stereo here at Umbro Towers!

Film

Not sure what it says about Umbro’s weekend habits, but The Hangover seems to have rung a bell with our staff, winning the most votes for favourite film. Once again, votes for other films were spread across a few titles, with Pixar’s charming Up and alien allegory District 9 the only other films to gain a pair of votes. Elsewhere, other films picked out were: Up, Ice Age 3, Harry Brown, Monsters Vs Aliens, The Damned Utd, Watchmen, Twlight – New Moon and Inglourious…

TV

The fact that we’re all big football fans here at Umbro is obvious, but the fact that Match Of The Day and the Football League Show were both picked out as some of our favourite television shows. Elsewhere, American imports such as Entourage and Lost were picked out, while UK comedies Gavin & Stacey, Peep Show and The Inbetweeners were also chosen. The fact that votes were cast for The Thick Of It and Stephen Fry’s Last Chance To See at least shows that the more cerebral mind does lurk somewhere along Umbro’s corridors.

Books

Asking Umbro staff about their favourite books of 2009 provoked some strange reactions. ‘I don’t have time to read!’ was quite common, as was the usual jokes about The Yellow Pages. However, there were some sensible suggestions, with the Twilight series of books featuring heavily. Elsewhere, Peter Hook’s How Not To Run A Club struck a chord, as did Victoria Hislop’s The Island, Iain Banks’ Transition, Antonia Frazer’s Marie Antoinette and Mark E Smith’s Renegade showed that at least a couple of us appreciate some culture!

Football

Asked for their favourite footballers and favourite football moments, Umbro’s staff turned into the usual tribal beasts, with plenty of one upmanship at play. Lionel Messi was a clear winner for favourite player, with Jimmy Bullard coming second, but a sign of the teams supported here at Umbro comes with the news that Newcastle’s Andy Carroll and Kevin Nolan were nominated alongside Ryan Giggs, Shaun Wright Philips, Darren ‘Twitter’ Bent, John Terry and Preston North End’s Ross Wallace.

Football moments varied so much, it’s probably easiest if we just quote some of our esteemed colleagues…

“Me winning the Umbro International 5-a-side Tournament”

“Boro getting relegated”

“Thierry Henry handing France a ticket to South Africa”

“Bent’s assist to the beach ball”

“Beating Chelsea and Arsenal in the same week”

“Wolfsburg winning the Bundesliga to show Europe that there are teams outside the Champions League.”

And for those of us that got to do it a couple of weeks ago, it had to be… “playing at Wembley!”

We thought that people would be interested in getting to know people at Umbro a little bit more, and so with that in mind, we went and had a chat with our new CEO Jim Allaker about all things football. Jim only joined the Umbro team a couple of months ago, but managed to find the time to tell us about his love for Sunderland and what he’s looking forward to here at Umbro.

Name: Becky                                                                                      

How long have you been here and what do you do?

I have been in the business for 14 months working as a Visual Merchandiser within the UK team focusing on Sports Direct stores. More recently, I moved to the Global Retail Marketing team where I will be looking after UK accounts and global product on a visual merchandising basis.

What would other people say you did?

Alongside my side kick people would say we are the visual link for the UK accounts. Making sure product looks ‘pretty’ and displayed in the best possible way. Also maker of a good cup of tea!

How is Umbro changing?

I am very excited about the the face of Umbro and where we are taking the brand. Umbro is becoming a modern football brand.

Where would you like to see it going?

Everywhere, total domination! To be the cool brand to be seen in would be great!

What do you think is the best/worst kit that Umbro have produced?

I love the new England shirt as it is totally different from any other shirts Umbro have designed. Even us girls can wear one and look good!

What memory of football do you hold most dear?

I remember being at college in september 2001 watching England vs. Germany in a World Cup qualifier. The atmosphere was electric with Michael Owen scoring a hat-trick and England went on to win 5-1! It was a great match and fantastic win.

If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be…

A fashion photographer! Think of those ‘A list’ swanky parties and male models!