The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever: 10 Years On

Ten years ago today, I was incredibly proud to launch a collaborative project with three good friends of mine. It was the culmination of thirteen months of countless discussions, shared opinions, and a collective vision to present a body of work that we hoped people would value and appreciate.

The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever was a response to a growing multitude of blog articles, each one lazily listing ‘the worst football shirts ever’ or some approximation therein. Most of them were a rehash of someone else’s equivalent posts and contained questionable choices, often poorly justified.

Seeing how frequently these articles were appearing (and despairing at the content they offered), I vowed to create an alternative that was more interesting to read, more thorough in its analysis, and more persuasive in its selection of football shirts as subject matter. I also wanted it to be positive in its attitude, assessing the best examples of design, rather than what was deemed to be the worst.

Luckily for me, I found three people that wanted to do the same. I proposed the creation of a new project to my co-blogger at the time, Rich Johnson (The Football Attic), and he quickly joined along with John Devlin (True Colours Football Kits) and Jay (formerly of DesignFootball.com). The four of us laid out our objectives and created a plan that ultimately took the form of 50 blog posts, each one focusing on an example of great football shirt design.

Starting in June 2015, we published one article every day for 50 days in the form of a countdown, culminating in what we felt was the ultimate football shirt. With help from guest writers Denis Hurley (Museum of Jerseys) and Les Motherby (Hull City Kits), we attracted a lot of interest from followers on social media where discussion about the project grew and grew. By the time the project ended in August 2015, we’d received praise from a great many people who seemed to appreciate the realisation of a job well done.

Ten years on, that pride remains within each of us. As a body of work, it’s still one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever worked on, and if you followed the series back then, I can only thank you for being a part of it. If you didn’t, you can read each of the articles here. We hope you enjoy them, and feel inspired to look at football shirt design in a positive way.

With thanks to Jay, John, Rich, Denis and Les,

Chris.