Top 10 ‘what the actual f***?’ football shirts includes sausages and blood

John Nicholson
Bizarre football shirts
Bizarre football shirts

Football shirts are iconic. Or at least they should be.

Players and managers come and go, billionaires buy our clubs and treat them like a contraceptive, but we still support the shirt. They should be an anchor in a turbulent world, but then they hand the anchors over to designers to ‘make a statement’ and the result is total humiliation.

Here’s 10 ‘what were they thinking?’ shirts. Not necessarily bad, just really feckin’ bizarre.

 

Colorado Caribous (away) 1978
I assume they were trying to plug into a cowboy vibe with this largely two-tone affair in a sort of dark chocolate on top and cappuccino below, divided by white piping. But the colour isn’t the controversial thing here. Oh no. It’s the Ozzy Osbourne-style fringe, made from leather which decorates it around the chest.

Have you ever seen a fringed football shirt? You have now. What next? Lace on Nottingham Forest’s shirt, or fish scales on Grimsby’s shirt or perhaps a parmo stuck on a Boro shirt?

The design was the idea of Jim Guercio, owner of the famous Caribou Ranch, a recording studio outside of Denver that was frequented by the likes of Elton John and Chicago, who he also produced when they were a big-selling jazz-rock band and he directed and produced cult X-Rated movie Electra Glide In Blue, which we used to sneak in to see when we were underage.

The shirt was certainly X-Rated. Guercio must have had the good stuff in his pipe at the time. The shirt should serve as an illustration of the dangers of drugs.

 

CD Palencia (home) 2016/17
You know those horror movies where creatures emerge from the underworld sans skin after some sort of acid accident; well this strip clearly took inspiration from that.

Incredibly, they printed a human muscle structure onto the whole strip. It looks like the sort of biology textbook illustration. The effect was to make the player look like a skinned rabbit hanging in a butcher’s window. It was supposed to represent the fact that the players would ‘give their skin’ for their club. Heart and soul? Yes. Skin? Skin? Actual skin? Gerroff you perv.

Palencia won the play-offs to earn promotion to the third tier, so the autopsy strip worked, possibly by disturbing the opposition.

 

Cultural Leonesa (home and away) 2015/16
The same bloke who designed the skinned rabbit strip also designed this, a dinner jacket print. Of course. Who doesn’t want to see their players running around in an approximation of white-lapelled dinner jacket over a black shirt and white dickie bow? They all look like waiters and the goalie has the opposite colour arrangement, making him look like the maitre d’ who should be showing people to tables, not standing in front of a net.

A percentage of shirt sales went to Save the Dream – an organisation committed to empowering young athletes, so that makes the humiliation worthwhile, I suppose.

 

La Hoya Lorca (away) 2013/14
Kids play football and encouraging them to eat right is obviously important. How can a shirt help? Why not print broccoli on it? After all, it is Murcia’s most successful export. They didn’t do this just once but twice, winning the third division wearing one, which led them to be called ‘El Brócoli Mecánico’ which means ‘The Clockwork Broccoli’ which is a great name and echoes A Clockwork Orange, who, if you copied, would involve playing in white boiler suits and bowler hat.

There must be a future in printing your region’s most popular export on shirts. Carlisle’s McVities biscuit shirts can’t be far away. Who wouldn’t want a Hobnob shirt?

 

Atletico Madrid (away) 2003/04
Shirts are the perfect situation for product advertisement, which is how we ended up with an away shirt adorned with a big spider’s web to advertise the Spiderman 2 movie. Diego Simione does look like you’d find him at the centre of a web. It didn’t stop there. They also had shirts to advertise other films and it changed from match to match whenever there was a new movie to push such as White Chicks, Hitch and Anaconda. I wonder what the shorts for Basic Instinct looked like. Flashy.

 

Athletic Bilbao (home) 2004/05
If your club wants to appear arty, get an actual artist to design your kit like Basque artist Dario Urzay. To celebrate the club getting back into Europe, this strip was inspired by the art in Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. It looks, to say the least, striking, more like big blobs of coagulated blood from a nosebleed or the sort of pieces of coral you see in a fish tank.

The kit was worn during pre-season in 2004 but they must have hated it so much it was not seen again, as Bilbao reverted to their traditional red-and-white stripes.

 

AFC Bedale (home) 2018/19
Bedale is a lovely North Yorkshire village close to Kirklington, home to Heck which makes delicious sausages, bacon and burgers, amongst other things and is also the sponsor for the local football team. Which is how their strip is a sausage-based affair.

At this very moment you can buy a strip adorned with cooked sausages and for the sausage squeamish, also a mixed veg outfit or a ‘vegan carrot themed away shirt’, though surely if the shirts are made of an oil-based fabric, that would make them not technically vegan, unless your principles don’t extend to creatures that died in the Paleozoic era but then humans didn’t kill them, so does that make it OK?

Putting food on shirts makes sense. I look forward to West Ham’s jellied eel away kit.

 

Celtic (away) 1991/92
I bet this is the club’s least popular retro kit. Of course it’s green, but with a massive white zig zag across the front with a black border. It looks like your idea of a strip when you’re seven and have drawn it in crayon. Ford sponsored this with ‘peoples’ across the front in blue, which I assume was a car 23 years ago and shows just how much a club’s culture was considered. The upper half looks made of two shades of moss.

The whole thing probably came with a laughable conceptual explanation. Celtic ended up third, so it hardly drove them to new heights the way a square sausage, battered pizza or Buckfast shirt would. Charlie Nicholas’ shirt was stolen from the football museum and returned. That’s how unwanted it was.

 

Getafe 2009/10
This is just downright weird. The Burger King – which was just a bloke in a rubber mask and wearing a crown – would be superimposed onto American adverts, intercept footballs and score touchdowns in various NFL-inspired ads. Hilarious, right? If you’re coked up, aye. Burger King decided to print their King’s face on to the reverse of a Getafe shirt so that you could pull the shirt over your head and see the Burger King looking out at you, even though those ads were not common in Europe and most had no idea who this was or why he was there.

The trouble they must have gone to do this is staggering, to almost zero effect. Mind you, the club had their best season ever in La Liga and reached the semi-finals of the Copa del Rey, so should we be critical?

 

Zamora CF 2018
Not Bobby’s team but a Spanish fourth division side that had a strip designed by Kappa. It is imprinted with a real circulatory system with the team’s logo used in place of the human heart and on the back is written ‘The blood, that reddish fluid that transports life through our body, which is born and flows from the heart to nourish our emotions and feelings.’ Just in case you didn’t know what blood did, presumably.

Spain seems to have a visceral relationship between the body and football, if you’ve always wondered where your spleen is or what your endocrine system does, there’s probably a shirt to show you.

Johnny Nic