What a Footballer’s Warm-Up Is Actually Doing
The pre-match warm-up is the most watched part of football that nobody watches. Supporters arrive during it, players go through it in front of a half-empty stadium, and most people…
The Facts, Stories and Ideas Behind the Beautiful Game
The pre-match warm-up is the most watched part of football that nobody watches. Supporters arrive during it, players go through it in front of a half-empty stadium, and most people…
Most kit descriptions tell you very little. A listing will mention moisture management and a slim cut, give you a size chart, and leave it there. What it will not…
Most advice on judging a football shirt from a listing is written with white kits in mind, because white shows everything. A red shirt is a different problem. Thin fabric,…
Most people assume training kit is a cheaper, plainer version of the match shirt. It is not. It is a different garment built for a different job, and the two…
A children’s football shirt has a harder life than an adult’s by a wide margin. It gets played in rather than watched in, it meets walls and playground tarmac, and…
Two shirts can be made of the same material and perform completely differently. The fibre is only the starting point. What determines whether a kit is comfortable through ninety minutes…
White home kits are the hardest thing to buy cheaply and the easiest thing to get wrong. Every production shortcut that a coloured shirt hides, a white one displays. Tottenham…
Most people buying a City shirt are choosing between two garments that share a colour, a crest and a name, and differ in almost every other respect. The listings rarely…
Put a 1998 Arsenal shirt next to a current one and the obvious differences are the collar, the sponsor and the cut. The differences that matter more are invisible. The…
For most of their history Brighton & Hove Albion were a club whose kit was better known than their results. Blue and white stripes, seagull on the chest, seaside in…