English County Teams

One fine day back in July 2007, I wrote a blog article which explored an alternate reality where, in England and Wales at least, there were no football clubs - only teams that represented the historic counties of those fine nations. The premise was loosely based around the origins of cricket in which if you showed an exceptional talent with bat or ball, you'd likely be invited to join your local county team. I went into some detail about which modern-day football stars would be playing for which county teams based on their birthplace, and speculated upon which teams might be most likely to win a notional County Football League.

And that's all very well, but there was one question I failed to ask back then: what would those county team kits look like? Eleven years on, I've decided to address this matter, and at the same time update the player references to make the whole thing topical again.

For the kit designs, I've used a standard Nike template - effectively the won worn by many teams in the 2018 World Cup - and given them specific sleeve motifs to make them pertinent to the counties in question. Each team also has a shirt sponsor which is a company based in that county, and the counties I've chosen are the twelve which I believe would have the best and biggest pool of talent to choose from. Artistic licence has been used to allow London to be included as a county in its own right. (Click on a kit to see a bigger version.)