Arsenal to play in red and blue stripped shirts with blue shorts? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. 800,000 visits last month
Arsenal to play in red and blue stripped shirts with blue shorts.
Err? Really. Arsenal in red and blue stripped shirts?
Yes, really, that is the story that did the rounds of the local newspapers that concerned themselves with Arsenal affairs towards the end of the 19th century.
The colour of the Arsenal shirt has always been an interesting debating point and was something of an issue at the recent meeting between Arsenal Independent Supporters Association and Tom Fox, the chief commercial officer at Arsenal, held at the Emirates Stadium.
What he failed to mention, but could have, was that at one time Arsenal played in the aforementioned red and blue stripped shirts with blue shorts. It was in the season 1895-1896 second division Woolwich Arsenal FC played in red and blue stripes with blue shorts.
Indeed the matter was put to him very forcibly in the fourth question of the Q and A session as one AISA member said,
I’ve been an Arsenal fan since 1968 and to me, Arsenal play in red shirts and white sleeves at home and yellow and blue away. How do the club justify blue hoops in the home kit and a purple away shirt?
Tom Fox, an American who has only been at the club a few years, actually showed a greater knowledge of Arsenal shirts than the fan when he replied, “In fairness, the blue part of the home shirt has been there through history. I can’t say I was around at the time, but I looked through images of every single Arsenal home shirt when we were sanctioning the design of the new home shirt and there was a five or six year period where a blue trim appeared on the shirt every year. Our job in marketing is to maximise the revenue so that we can fund our football club against teams with unlimited resources.”
In fact what Tom could also have said was that from 1933 to 1960 Arsenal also played in blue and white socks – and if ever an era is to be marked out as classic Arsenal it must be the 1930s when that was the case.
The trouble with defining club colours is that they always change and can become confusing. From the earliest of days, Royal Arsenal (the original club) was known colloquially as “The Reds”, even though from the moment they joined the Football League in 1893 the red was very dark and was regularly mixed with blue shorts.
(Incidentally the team in the days before the first world war were never called The Gunners. It was their fans who were The Gunners, and the team who were The Reds” – which made their choice of shirt colour even more odd).
As for blue, the first blue appeared in 1889 while the club was still playing at the Manor Ground in Plumstead.
Back at the AISA meeting Tom Fox went on to say, “We liaise with our kit supplier and we can’t limit the design scope too much otherwise it’s too difficult to come up with a new design. But we do set some ground rules.
“For the home shirt, we say it has to be a red shirt with white sleeves. But beyond that, the supplier needs scope with the design, also so that they can sell the shirt in China, the U.S. etc. We’ve done a two year home shirt this year and we’re the only club in the world to do that.
“We understand the connection with yellow and blue. It will come back, but other fans of other ages in different parts of the world will want something different. For instance, we’re told the purple and black kit is selling well with younger kids because it goes with current fashion. We need to ask ourselves what the away kit is and allow ourselves to take a few more risks. The simple answer is that we need to sell as many as possible and we would disadvantage ourselves by not changing it. If it’s not sufficiently different to the last shirt, it won’t sell.
“The home shirt will stay more traditional, but with the away shirt we’ll take more risks and it will change. The yellow will reappear from time to time, but we need to do something different. We try to limit the disruption where we can and that applies to the home shirt too.”
The first truly red (rather than maroon) shirt appeared when the club was elected to the first division in 1919, as football resumed after the war. That kit had white shorts, with blue socks. The kit gradually got darker until March 1933 (interestingly part way through a season!) when the white sleeves appeared (legend has it, at Herbert Chapman’s insistence, but there is no real record of this). What is more generally forgotten is that as the white sleeves came in, at the very same moment the socks changed from white with red trim to blue and white!
In another blow to the version of history popularised by our fan from the 1960s, the fact is that between 1965 and 1967 the red sleeves vanished all together and the club played in an all red top. As for the blue socks, the last time we saw them was in a curious blue and white stripped edition for the 1992/3 season.
I am grateful to JD Sports for their information that helped me put this article together. Their football shirts site is here: www.jdsports.co.uk/men/mens-clothing/football-shirts/ and their boots site is here: www.jdsports.co.uk/men/mens-footwear/football-boots/