As we have collected and displayed the huge Umbro kit archive here and on our flickr page, it has become very clear that our readers love football kits as much as we do. Everything from colours, prints and badges come under the spotlight but one thing that is constantly at the root of questioning is if, and how, the replica shirts the fans buy are different from those worn by the players. We have finally done something about the uncertainty and asked a couple of people in the know. Two people who can provide a definitive answer are Kevin and Sarah who help develop fabrics for those kits you and the players wear.

Let’s start with what Sarah had to say:

I think we could safely say that what the players wear is what is on sale in the shops. There may be some slight differences such as sometimes the Players shirt will have a different embroidery or other application than the shirt that goes in the shops. I think we have prided ourselves on delivering to the customer what the players are getting , the fabric is definitely the same for both. I know that’s not true of other brands but we like to pride ourselves on that fact.

Normally, we would feel this was fair enough, but we may have had a tip-off… ‘What about the England shirt that had the silver in it?’ we asked:

Ah! You got me on that one! That was a new technology (X-static) we decided to introduce into the new England away shirt. It had anti-microbial properties and it had a very exciting cattle-prod type tool that demonstrated the fact that there was metal in the fabric which I think sold it to us all!

We did do a player’s shirt that was fully X-static whereas in the retail version there were zonal areas that we had identified as being the areas where it needed to be X-static. I’d say that was one of the only jerseys that we did that had a difference and that was purely a cost issue because it was very expensive to produce. We just couldn’t afford to put it in a retail piece.

We were quite happy to go away with this amount of information, but Kevin let us in on another kit that had differences between what the players wore and what was seen in retail. Once again, it concerned an England kit from 2003-05 (picture at top of post) but the reason for why there ended up being two versions left us laughing for quite a while…

We did a reversible home shirt that had blue stripes on the inside which was technically brilliant, the first white reversible football jersey. The one that the players wore didn’t end up having the stripes. That was because David [kit designer] took it home and had a shower in it and the stripes were visible through the fabric. Don’t ask me why – or about his methods – but that’s what he did. It paid off though because it stopped us giving the kit to the players and the blue being visible through the white in the rain.

So that settles it. With few exceptions the Umbro players shirts are the same as the replica shirts that are sold in the shops.