Victorian era The first written evidence of a clothing item specifically dedicated to football comes in 1526, from the
Great Wardrobe of King
Henry VIII of England, which included a reference to a pair of football boots. The earliest evidence of coloured shirts used to identify football teams comes from early
English public school football games, for example an image of
Winchester College football from before 1840 is entitled "The commoners have red and the college boys blue jerseys" and such colours are mentioned again in a ''
Bell's Life in London'' article of 1858. House sporting colours are mentioned in
Rugby football (rule XXI) as early as 1845: "No player may wear cap or jersey without leave from the head of his house". In 1848, it was noted at Rugby that "considerable improvement has taken place in the last few years, in the appearance of a match... in the use of peculiar dress consisting of velvet caps and jerseys". Organised association football was first played in England in the 1860s, and many teams would probably play in whatever clothing they had available, with players of the same team distinguishing themselves by wearing coloured caps or sashes. One report of an 1860 match played to an indeterminate code, between Spalding Football Club and Spalding Victoria, refers to Spalding as the "pinks" and Victoria as the "blues". Limiting colours simply to caps or sashes proved to be problematic though, and an 1867 handbook of the game suggested that teams should attempt "if it can be previously so arranged, to have one side with striped jerseys of one colour, say red, and the other with another, say blue. This prevents confusion and wild attempts to wrest the ball from your neighbour." Many clubs opted for colours associated with the schools or other sporting organisations from which the clubs had emerged.
Blackburn Rovers, for example, adopted shirts of a halved design based on those of the team for former pupils of
Malvern College, one of the schools where the sport had developed. Their original colours of light blue and white were chosen to reflect an association with Cambridge University, where a number of the club's founders had been educated. Colours and designs often changed dramatically between matches, with
Bolton Wanderers turning out in both pink shirts and white shirts with red spots within the same year. By the turn of the century pads had become smaller and were being worn inside the stockings. Two years later,
Argentina's adopted red shirts after watching
Nottingham Forest play. in 1910 In 1904,
the Football Association dropped its rule that players' knickerbockers must cover their knees and teams began wearing them much shorter. They became known as "knickers", and were referred to by this term until the 1960s when "shorts" became the preferred term. and
Scotland's
Clyde wore
khaki. In the 1950s kits worn by players in southern Europe and South America became much more lightweight, with V-necks replacing collars on shirts and synthetic fabrics replacing heavy natural fibres. With the advent of international competitions such as the
European Cup, the southern European style spread to the rest of the continent and by the end of the decade the heavy shirts and boots of the pre-war years had fallen entirely out of use. The 1960s saw little innovation in kit design, with clubs generally opting for simple colour schemes which looked good under the newly adopted floodlights.
Modern era , became the norm in the modern era. In the 1970s, clubs began to create strongly individual strips, and in 1975,
Leeds United, who had changed their traditional blue and gold colours to all white in the 1960s to mimic
Real Madrid, became the first club to design shirts which could be sold to
fans in the form of replicas. Driven by commercial concerns, other clubs soon followed suit, adding manufacturers'
logos and a higher level of trim. In 1976,
Kettering Town wore the first sponsored shirts in English football;
the Football Association, the sport's governing body in England, quickly banned sponsorship on kits, though they relaxed the ban a year later. Soon almost all major clubs had signed such deals, and the cost to companies who sponsor large teams has increased dramatically. In 2008 German club
FC Bayern Munich received €25 million in sponsorship money from
Deutsche Telekom. However Spanish clubs
FC Barcelona and
Athletic Bilbao refused to allow sponsors' logos to appear on their shirts as recently as 2005. Until 2011 Barcelona refused paying sponsors in favour of wearing the
UNICEF logo on their shirts while donating €1.5 million to the charity per year. Players also began to sign sponsorship deals with individual companies. In 1974
Johan Cruijff refused to wear the
Dutch national team's strip as its
Adidas branding conflicted with his own individual contract with
Puma, and was permitted to wear a version without the Adidas branding. Puma had also paid
Pelé $120,000 to wear their boots and specifically requested that he bend down and tie his laces at the start of the
1970 FIFA World Cup final, ensuring a close-up of the boots for a worldwide television audience. In the 1970s, the U.S.-based
North American Soccer League experimented with printing players' names on their shirts and allocating each player a squad number rather than simply numbering the 11 players starting a game from 1 to 11, but these ideas did not catch on at the time in other countries. On 22 August 1979, during a
1979–80 Coppa Italia game against
AC Milan, Italian team
Monza displayed the players' names above the numbers on the back, a novelty at the time dubbed "" (American style); the Italian Football Federation did not approve of the change and fined the club. Shortly after, AC Milan themselves added names to players' shirts in 1980. The names were removed in 1981 and for many years they would not be adopted by any other team in Italy. 's midfielder Maddè versus
Juventus' forward
Bettega in 1975: "short shorts" were the norm from the mid-1960s to the early-90s, when they changed back to a classic longer and baggier form. In the 1980s, manufacturers such as
Hummel and
Adidas began to design shirts with increasingly intricate designs, as new technology led to the introduction of such design elements as shadow prints and pinstripes. Shorts became shorter than ever during the 1970s and 1980s, In the
1991 FA Cup Final Tottenham Hotspur's players lined up in long baggy shorts. Although, the new look was derided, clubs in Britain and elsewhere had within a short time adopted the longer shorts. In the 1990s shirt designs became increasingly complex, with many teams sporting extremely gaudy colour schemes. Design decisions were increasingly driven by the need for the shirt to look good when worn by fans as a fashion item, In 1996,
Manchester United notoriously introduced a grey strip which had been specifically designed to look good when worn with jeans, but abandoned it halfway through a match after manager
Alex Ferguson claimed that the reason why his team was losing 3–0 was that the players could not see each other on the pitch. United switched to different colours for the second half and scored one goal without reply. A brief fad arose for players celebrating goals by lifting or completely removing their shirts to reveal political, religious or personal slogans printed on undershirts. This led to a ruling from the
International Football Association Board in 2002 that undershirts must not contain slogans or logos; since 2004 it has been a bookable offence for players to remove their shirts. The market for replica shirts has grown enormously, with the revenue generated for leading clubs and the frequency with which they change designs coming under increased scrutiny, especially in the United Kingdom, where the market for replicas is worth in excess of £200m. Several clubs have been accused of
price fixing, and in 2003
Manchester United were fined £1.65m by the
Office of Fair Trading. The high prices charged for replicas have also led to many fans buying
fake shirts which are imported from countries such as
Thailand and
Malaysia. The chance for fans to purchase a shirt bearing the name and number of a star player can lead to significant revenue for a club. In the first six months after
David Beckham's transfer to
Real Madrid the club sold more than one million shirts bearing his name. A market has also developed for shirts worn by players during significant matches, which are sold as collector's items. The shirt worn by
Pelé in the
1970 FIFA World Cup Final sold at auction for over £150,000 in 2002. A number of advances in kit design have taken place since 2000, with varying degrees of success. In 2002 the
Cameroon national team competed in the
African Cup of Nations in Mali wearing shirts with no sleeves, but
FIFA later ruled that such garments were not considered to be shirts and therefore were not permitted. Manufacturers
Puma AG initially added "invisible" black sleeves to comply with the ruling, but later supplied the team with new one-piece
singlet-style tops. a decision later reversed after an appeal. More successful were the skin-tight shirts designed for the
Italian national team by manufacturers
Kappa, a style subsequently emulated by other national teams and club sides. A brief fashion for men wearing
snood scarf neckwarmers ended in 2011 when the IFAB banned them as potentially dangerous. A ban on women wearing the
hijab was introduced by the IFAB in 2007, but lifted in 2012 after pressure from
Prince Ali of Jordan. In keeping with
French views, the
French Football Federation said it would maintain its ban. ==See also==