Take One Kit

Coventry City away 1976-81

Not many football teams dare to bring the colour of brown into their kit palette. It's hardly a surprise for obvious reasons. The one-time chant of 'you're sh*t, and you know you are' has a certain appropriateness when the opposing team is resplendent in faecal tones.

Yet for all that, brown is as valid a colour for football kits as any other - perhaps more so. Brown contrasts well with the ever-present background of football pitch green, it's as interesting in a lighter shade as it is in a darker one, and it's a colour found commonly in nature, unlike the vibrant reds and blues we're more familiar with.

So it wasn't without sound logic that Coventry City introduced their brown away kit, made by Admiral in 1976. Nor was it a surprise when you consider Admiral were the ultimate experimentalists in football kit design back in the day, rarely surpassed in the years that have followed.

But the brown away kit they provided for the Highfield Road club in the mid-1970s remains as much of a challenging concept now as it ever was then. The shirt featured Admiral's famous 'tramlines' motif, but there was no getting away from it... this was a brown football kit. So how could this infamous kit design have been made better; more acceptable? Here are five suggestions that show what might have been...

A: More white

If the colour brown was the main issue, it makes sense to dilute it wherever possible, but you wouldn't want to take it all away otherwise what's the point? So for this design, I've changed the shorts to the plain white seen on other Admiral kits of the day, and changed the socks to white too. Both feature the Admiral logo in the traditional places, and the overall result is that the kit has more balance. The shirt remains its usual brown self, but the white shorts and socks remove the severity that the real all-brown kit possessed.

B: Sky blue tramlines

Coventry's original brown away kit was sometimes worn with yellow socks and looked not especially bad as a result, but surely a better accent colour would have been sky blue? As a complement to dark brown, the hues of a summer sky work very well indeed, so on this design I've changed all the white detailing to sky blue. Perhaps something of an acquired taste, it makes the kit look more interesting and provides a little bit of continuity from the home kit, which is never a bad thing.

C: Light brown tramlines

The other way of dealing with the brownness is to crank up the levels to maximum by adding more brown to the kit. To that end, I've tinted the white collar, tramlines and sock turnover logos to a lighter shade of brown than that which provides the main colouring for the kit. This works particularly well, I feel. Think of this as a tribute to brown, an indulgent binge into the world of chocolatey loveliness, nay, a cocoa-flavoured symphony for the eyes. Something like that.

D: Two-tone brown

Taking the approach of Design C in a slightly different direction, this one softens the dark brown by rendering the shirt and socks in a slightly lighter tone. In so doing, the kit looks more stylised than the original, but doesn't lessen the boldness of those bright white tramlines. Suffice to say that the material Admiral owned for making the shirts would have only been in one shade of brown, yet by spending a bit more money on some differently coloured fabric, they could have enhanced the original Coventry away kit to make it legendary for rather better reasons.

E: Wider tramlines

Returning full circle, this design tries to lessen the starkness of all that dark brown by introducing more white to the kit. On this occasion, however, it's achieved by widening those white tramlines to subtly redress the balance between the two colours. For what my opinion's worth, I think it works really well, even making the kit look slightly more modern (although don't ask me to explain why - it just does). I'd even go so far as to say Admiral missed a trick by not making all their tramlines this wide across their entire portfolio, but there's little that can be done about it now, admittedly.

So there are my five alternatives, but which one do you like best? Just for fun, I invite you to vote for your favourite design below! It's not a competition - just a way of gauging your thoughts and design sensibilities. Also, if you want to be more detailed in your feedback, please drop me a line via the Kitbliss pages on Twitter or Facebook or via the Contact page on this website. Thank you!