34. Adidas Santos / Santiago (1980-85)
Chris Oakley | 18 June 2025
It blew my tiny young mind when I discovered that some European club teams used to wear two different home and away shirts in the space of a single season. I had no idea they had long-sleeved shirts for the cooler months, and short-sleeved shirts - in an alternative design - when the weather was warmer.
In the UK, it was more commonplace for one shirt design to be created identically in both long- and short-sleeved versions, save for all the usual modifications. Adopting the continental two-kit system would have had a bigger impact on British football fans than many of them realise. It would have created minor confusion for just about everyone, and children would have nagged their parents twice as much to buy them yet another shirt. Spare a thought, also, for John Devlin who, 25 years or more later, would have been asked by his publisher to find enough content to fill twice as many pages as actually ended up in his True Colours books.
From left: Arminia Bielefeld (1982-83 home), Bayern Munich (1982 home), Bochum (1982-83 home), Borussia Dortmund (1981-82 home).
France and Germany, in particular, had no such concerns. They were already familiar with the two-kit approach, and it’s where the Adidas Santos/Santiago template gained great popularity. Specifically created as a long-sleeve shirt design only, it was often paired with Adidas La Paz, the preferable option when short sleeves were required. Both designs featured pinstripes, but Santos/Santiago included a winged collar where they could be shown off even more, and at a rakish angle at that.
Pinstripes first appeared on English football shirts in 1981, as supporters of Leeds United, Norwich City, Ipswich Town and Nottingham Forest will testify. That’s when Umbro and Adidas introduced the revolutionary look to the Football League, but France’s national team got a headstart on all of them when it wore Santos/Santiago in a friendly match against West Germany in November 1980. Yet for all the brilliance of those newfangled pinstripes, the most eye-catching detail was perhaps something that was already starting to look a little old-fashioned - the triangular inset below the collar.
From left: Bulgaria (1984 home), Czechoslovakia (1983-84 home), East Germany (1985 home), France (1980-84 home).
Adidas themselves had already been using the triangular decoration on many of its shirts throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some looked remarkably similar to Santos/Santiago, but they often rendered the triangle in a secondary colour along with its accompanying winged collar. What made the new template distinctive was the way it used colour to draw the eye to the triangle alone. A canny bit of styling, but one that’s easy to overlook.
Santos/Santiago quickly saturated West Germany’s Bundesliga and France’s Division 1 in 1981. Teams all the way from Nantes to Nürnberg were proudly wearing their new garb, and in many cases continued to do so for several seasons. The trouble was, it only ever appeared for a short period of time in each campaign. As soon as the colder weather dissipated, Santos/Santiago was shelved in favour of a short-sleeved alternative.
From left: France (1981 and 1983 away), Girondins de Bordeaux (1981-83 home), Hungary (1983-84 home), Nantes (1982-83 home).
You therefore had to be quick (and observant) to spot a version of the template being worn, but luckily national teams were just as likely to provide another outlet for the keen kit watcher. Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary were no strangers to the new Adidas shirt, as were Switzerland and the Netherlands. The latter wore a very nice orange version with black trim, but alas we never got to see a change kit to go with it for the young Ruud Gullit and Ronald Koeman.
Personally, I’m a big fan of West Germany’s green away shirt which has to be considered among their very best. Like every version of Santos/Santiago, it seemed to know when and where to use the primary colour and secondary colour to greatest effect. It couldn’t even be diminished by the enormous - some might say invasive - presence of the Europe 1 branding on the yellow shirts of Nantes. Quite the opposite, in fact. If anything, the template was given extra cojones because of it.
From left: Netherlands (1981-84), PSV Eindhoven (1982 home), Toulouse (1983 home), West Germany (1981-82 away).
Not many football shirt templates can be labelled as a classic, but this one certainly can. If someone said to you ‘how were shirts styled in the early 80s?,’ this would be the perfect example to show them. It’s connected so strongly with the first half of that decade, largely because the styling and simplicity of the design was exactly what so many teams wanted. The great sadness is that it was never seen in England at the time. Too bad. It’s not like there wasn’t enough cold weather for it.
To see the full set of Adidas Santos/Santiago kits, visit the Adidas Santos/Santiago template gallery page.