The Art and Science of Designing A Football Shirt

 

Football shirts is a fashion that transcend different generations and class. It’s all about those beautiful memories and emotional attachment with your favourite football team. Now we're in the days where football shirts are not just for going to a football match - they’re streetwear, casuals people wear even to occasions and they’re part of our life now.”

The Art

Each football club is a tribe, a movement of people with their own ideals and culture .A club may have consciously or unconsciously developed their own standards, rituals and sacraments...which a football shirt designer must have a vast understanding of the metaphysical, social-cultural make up of the team they are designing their shirt. 

Teams have their own history, colour combinations and fashion sense, so in designing the team shirt the designer must be careful not to push the boundaries so much with his lofty ideas and creativity. Fans can outrightly reject your design.. They may even get superstitious to attribute a team's failure to the shirt design they wore that season and that's how fans are. 

Designing a football shirt is a whole different genre in fashion that tries to capture fans emotional and cultural experiences of their favorite team

The responsibility in designing football shirts as creating the classics of the future, you want to spark imagination and create something that fans can connect to, get behind and be interested in. Something that captures their emotional appeal and spur them to purchase the replicas. 

We met some of the unsung heroes of football fan culture to gain a deep insight into how football shirt design tells stories founded on nostalgia. Inigo Turner, David Hicks and James Webb have created some remarkable football shirts. Hicks designed some of the stunning Roma shirts in the 90s, and Turner and Webb worked on the iconic Arsenal “bruised banana” revamp from last season, among many others.

He believes each club and national team has a unique story to tell. “They all have a past. We’re not trying to reinvent the past, but we are looking to somewhat celebrate it,” He declares. “We’re also looking into the future. Everything we do has somehow got a story behind it, and it’s our aim to tell these stories.”

Super Eagles Nike Shirt - for 2018 World Cup

Pete Hoppins, Nike's Design Director said about the Nigeria national team hit jersey. 

While no one expects Nigeria to challenge for the World Cup2018, we felt that there’s something going on with Nigeria as a young team. There’s a confidence in all these young players, they’re going to go for it and we were attracted to that. 

We’ve been following them from afar, and the players on social media...a lot of them are playing in some of the top clubs in Europe, and there’s that boldness that aligns in Nigeria and Lagos and in London. We thought that there’s something in here to do something different.

The shirt green and black zig zag design depicts such energy and "the never say die" of the Nigerian spirit. Something the fans were able to relate with...They could feel the energy, boldness and determination around the team aligned with the design creativity. And the performance of the team in their friendly with Argentina and England gave the people such lofty hope to associate with the team and to declare "Proudly Nigerians!

 The result was of course, to manufacture over three million pieces of the shirt in one month before the world Cup in Russia, we couldn't keep up with the demand. 

  Manchester United third shirt still selling like hot cakes

The Adidas designers Inigo Turner and Chris Barnard stirrup a controversy this season with Man-U white and black stripes shirt. Surprised, the shirt sales has a landslide sales, almost usurpiing the home and away kits

The Manchester United third shirt this year - it's attracted a lot of controversy. This black and white shirt is dazzling. But it's got a story behind it. And the story which we tried to tell is that the stripes are a part of the culture of the club and ultimately Manchester. It’s about their history from 100 years ago, but also about what’s relevant now.”

The Science

“We need to inject more passion into the ideas and then you’ll see some amazing stuff. For example, the famous Arsenal 2005/06 burgundy Kit

When approaching any challenge as a material scientist, we assess the activity being undertaken, identify the desired material properties required, and scour a library of known materials for these properties to identify which material, or indeed materials, could potentially be used in this particular application. Then follows experimentation, prototyping and testing, and further iterative improvement of the product before it is launched.

This process has happened with each piece of kit that a footballer wears or uses. 

Let’s start with a fan favorite – the humble football shirt. So much more than an advertising board and a modesty manager, football shirts have been engineered over the years to ensure that the player maintains optimal playing comfort throughout a match, come rain or shine, so they can perform to the best of their ability. 

To a large extent, this has been achieved by using man-made polymer materials, often polyesters, whose properties can easily be tailored to requirements.

No one wants to feel weighed down by their attire when they are running around playing football. This is why the materials used in football shirts are very light and very thin.

 They also need to have a tensile strength high enough to prevent the shirts from ripping too easily in a bad tackle.  Despite there being very little material, football shirts are highly engineered.

 On a rainy day, very little water is absorbed by a polyester shirt (around 0.4% of its weight), owing to the low absorbency of this thin material, unlike a T shirt made of cotton which could soak up a lot of water (around 7% of its weight). 

When a player gets hot, the shirt can also help keep a player cool and dry. If sweat is formed on the player’s skin under the shirt, the materials that make up the shirt help to physically move this away from the skin.

In case you need a customized, well tailored football jerseys  with the best materials Call or WhatsApp: +234 809 877 2556