Design classics come in all shapes and sizes – the Volkswagen Beetle, the Big Mac, the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet... and the England 1982 football shirt
SCORE DRAW ADVERTORIAL
That contemporary sports brands crave nostalgic validation is perfectly evidenced throughout the plethora of current Premier League kit designs to varying degrees of success. Nike’s 1982-inspired England’s ‘pre-match’ shirt for the 2018 World Cup is the ultimate example, with many supporters left wondering why this wasn’t the home shirt. We closed our eyes and reminisced about the classic Admiral design and Kevin Keegan, but we were left holding on to our wallets as the training kit prematurely sold out.
In recent seasons Adidas Originals have been resurrecting their archive of classic designs at Manchester United and Arsenal where, decades after the event, they have returned as brand partner – the ‘bruised banana’ is back in our vocabulary again. And original sponsors from the 1980s and ’90s have been appearing in stadium stores to remind ourselves of an age of burgeoning consumerism – Sharp, JVC, NEC, Brother, Newcastle Brown Ale, Commodore, Holsten, Dr Martens...
Meanwhile, beneath the Plimsoll Line of the football mega-brands, through the misty-eyed retrospective lens that yearns for the finer qualities of years gone by, Cambridge-based retro football brand Score Draw have been authentically and aesthetically giving football addicts what they really want to wear.
Gone are the days of the ‘old-fashioned football shirt’ worn by the anoraks. The Score Draw archive of best-sellers is bursting with vibrant classic designs from the heydays of kit design – ‘contemporary retro’ seems the perfect oxymoron to this prolific commercial success story. Put together with painstaking attention to detail, these reproductions are indistinguishable from their predecessors 30 years earlier.
Key to the success of this concept is that football clubs now empower Score Draw to extract these accuracies from their archive, plus the willingness of Score Draw to indulge the often convoluted manufacturing process that each design merits. The end results are stunningly accurate and football shirt history is meticulously recorded in a huge portfolio exceeding 1,000 designs.
Drawn inextricably to the glorious football renaissance of Italia 90, the Score Draw ‘bullseye’ revives the England kitbag of that tournament and the finest football shirt trilogy of all-time – the red, white and blue Umbro shirts which are now in ubiquitous evidence at England matche
