39. Adidas 'Carnival' (1991-93) *

Graphic showing examples of the Adidas 'Carnival' shirt template

Chris Oakley | 22 December 2024

Where football shirt design is concerned, there is much pleasure to be had from seeing something so rare, yet so magnificent. Such is the case with the Adidas ‘Carnival’ template whose very name is so elusive as to require an unofficial replacement on my part.

There can’t be many shirt collectors or kit fans that haven’t seen this design before. A by-product of the change in aesthetics that occurred when the 1980s became the 1990s, it eschewed the conventional plain and striped creations of yore in favour of a more random ideology.

Adidas took a plain shirt and added to it a few thin stripes here and there, some rectangles on one shoulder (some in grey), and finished it all off with a coloured stripe across the upper chest. The result was a design so distinctive as to be almost inappropriate.

Templates of this kind are seldom adopted wholesale throughout world football as the new normal, and this one proved to be a particularly hard sell. To the best of my knowledge, only four (or at best five) teams dared to don this TV test card in football shirt form, and three of those could lazily be lumped in together to be treated as a single entity.

Because of that very rationale, nearly every version of this template is either red with black and white detailing or white with red and black detailing. To find out why, we must go back to March 1991 when the Soviet Union wore their ‘Carnival’ kit in a traditional red-white-red combination. The following month, they wore their all-white away kit against Hungary, but both versions were worn several times through to the end of 1991.

From left: Boca Juniors (1992 away), Commonwealth of Independent States (1992 home and away).

On December 26th of that year, the USSR ceased to exist as a sovereign state, but the consequence of that in football terms wouldn’t be felt until the following month. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) became the temporary name under which many of the former Soviet players would play, and in January 1992 they played against the United States wearing the old white ‘Carnival’ kit, complete with badge. The all-red version of the kit was later worn against England in a June ‘92 friendly, but both kits were briefly shelved so that the CIS team could wear a different template during the 1992 European Championships.

Finally in August 1992, Russia was able to play an international match using its own name when facing Mexico at the Lokomotiv Stadium, Moscow. Though the name might have been new, however, the kit they wore wasn’t. Once again, the all-white USSR combination was given an airing as a de facto home kit. Even the red edition had one last hurrah when Russia played Israel in March 1993 (without the USSR crest), but that would be the last time any Soviet or post-Soviet team would wear the ‘Carnival’ template.

Officially speaking, Boca Juniors were the only other team that wore the design, but it’s been suggested that fellow Argentinian club Estudiantes de la Plata did the same. We’ll come to them in a moment.

From left: Russia (1992 home and 1993 away), USSR (1991 home and away).

Boca’s delightful white, blue and yellow away kit was only ever worn in one game in 1992 against Rosario Central. It’s the only version to have its Adidas three-stripe trim in the primary colour of the shirt, and is the only to feature a sponsor logo below the single horizontal band. That alone, plus its limited usage, would make it an appealing prospect, but the way all three colours work so harmoniously lifts it to a whole other level, in my view. Such a pity we didn’t see it more often.

As for Estudiantes de la Plata, there are images on the internet of a red third shirt supposedly belonging to them, but exhaustive research has failed to bring forth an image of the shirt being worn in a match situation. As always, this means I’ll not be illustrating it for Kitbliss right now, but one can’t help feeling that it must have been worn at some point. Why else, do you suppose, would they have released a third shirt in 2022 that was a deliberate tribute to the design?

Regardless of this side issue, Adidas ‘Carnival’ was worn by only a select few teams in only a few colours and for a relatively short space of time. That makes it a precious thing, an artefact whose existence was fleeting and formidable, yet could easily become forgotten and overlooked with the passing of time. As fans of football kit design, we shouldn’t allow this to happen. This template is a paragon of virtue, and should be celebrated for as long as we look for brilliance in football shirt design.

 

To see the full set of Adidas 'Carnival' kits, visit the Adidas 'Carnival' template gallery page.

 

Update:

I'd like to extend my thanks to Jesper Krogshede Sørensen on Facebook who told me that Swiss club Aarau wore the 'Carnival' template between 1991 and 1993. Though at first glance it looks practically the same as the USSR/CIS away kit in white and black, the coloured stripe across the chest appears to be pink, rather than red. That being the case, I'm even more pleased to be told about it... Thanks once again, Jesper!

In addition, a big thank you goes out to Alejandro Cortina who confirmed that Estudiantes de la Plata DID wear their version in a match situation, but the single match in question was a friendly against Paraguayan side Olimpia. Because of that, I won't be adding it to the website, but it was good to have the confirmation. Thank you very much, Alejandro!

See also:

* Unofficial template name