37. Lotto 'Opera' (2005-08) *
Chris Oakley | 22 February 2025
In the mid-2000s, it felt like football kit design was going just a little bit stale. In domestic British football at least, the trend was towards ‘modern traditional’ with piping and curved blocks of colour adding a contemporary feel to what had been seen before. The football kits of 20 years ago were proficient enough, but somehow leaned towards the safe and the unassuming. Thankfully one sportswear brand had other ideas.
Lotto were never shy of throwing caution to the wind (as we’ve already discovered), yet it can be argued that they were never the sort of company to metaphorically wear a spinning bow tie to gain attention. With an uncanny sense of timing, they could always be relied upon to design an extraordinary football shirt at exactly the moment when everyone else was creating something altogether less inspiring. Here we assess one very good example.
From left: Gençlerbirliği (2006 home), FC Gueugnon (2006 home, 2007 away), Jeunesse Esch (2006-08 home).
As an answer to the perpetual question of how to present stripes on a shirt in a new and different way, Lotto did the unthinkable. Where other companies might have changed the width or positioning of the stripes, they instead allowed them to bend at the top in different directions like a cartoon character on a packet of string cheese.
The effect was startling. When assessing the whole kit from the socks upwards, everything seems very ordinary. Plain socks, simple shorts... even the bottom of the shirt is standard fare. Half-way up the shirt, however, those stripes suddenly depict the route taken by three kids looking for a place to avoid detection in a game of Hide and Seek. Incredible.
From left: JS Kabylie (2006-08 home), Kayseri Erciyesspor (2006-07 home), Lausanne-Sport (2007 home), Mainz 05 (2006-07 home).
The fact that each stripe bends differently only adds to the joy of the design. I recall Crystal Palace’s 1977-78 away shirt being in some ways distantly related, but of course it was a completely symmetrical design. The central stripe was straight and the outer stripes curved in a mirror image of each other, because anything else would’ve caused the United Nations to convene some sort of emergency meeting. As a planet, we just wouldn’t have coped with Lotto’s design back then.
Instead, we were made to wait until 2005 before seeing Lotto’s creation. Udinese appear to be the first team that wore the template, although the only pictures I could find were from Champions League matches against Barcelona, Panathinaikos and others. Many teams soon followed in 2006; Mainz 05 being the most notable, along with Gençlerbirliği and Kayseri Erciyesspor in Turkey and FC Gueugnon from France’s Serie B. Soon after that, the template was even being worn by clubs as far afield as Algeria and Morocco. I even found one or two instances of the design being worn in South America, but the details associated with them are frustratingly sparse.
From left: Raja Casablanca (2007-08 home), Udinese (2005 home), USM Alger (2008 home).
Yet again, we encounter the eternal dilemma: when a shirt looks this way-out, how could it ever become a universal success? The answer, as ever, is that it couldn’t. There will always be a minority that loves the sheer sense of imagination and freedom this template embodies, but most people don’t want their team to be even remotely ridiculed for what they’re wearing. Despite the presence of a rather stylish sculpted side collar and neckline, this shirt still runs the risk of causing a few giggles among opposing fans. Bendy stripes? You must be joking!
Therein lies the intrinsic limitations of a template such as this, but bravery in design should always be rewarded. It’s as much as I can do to give Lotto another entry in my top 100, but I do so in the hope that modern football kit designers can take inspiration from what they see here and create something equally as impressive. Let’s hope so.
To see the full set of Lotto 'Opera' kits, visit the Lotto 'Opera' template gallery page.
See also:
* Unofficial template name