The Daily: Friday 30th June 2023
Yes, everything is okay at Barnsley
The world of football kit design has become increasingly detailed, in recent years. The idea of a ‘plain’ shirt does still exist, but the definition of the word ‘plain’ has become somewhat elastic. By default, with competition badges, sleeve and shirt sponsors, squad numbers and player names, they’re cluttered before a single swipe of the designer’s stylus across their Ipad screen takes place.
But then again, the same could have been said forty years ago, when sponsor’s logos were just starting to become commonplace enough to be allowed on the television, or fifty years ago, when manufacturer badges were just starting to creep onto shirts for the first time.
Actual designs themselves have become increasingly intricate in just the last few years. Stripes have become jagged, fuzzy, or otherwise distorted. Intricate patterns are considered de rigeur. And that’s just fine. I hardly think that I’m the target audience for this season’s replica shirt any more. The club shop has got old farts like us covered with an array of retro shirts from whenever you happened to be ten years old, anyway.
But while I may not necessarily be the target audience for this season’s replica kit, that doesn’t mean that all people of roughly my age aren’t, and so it is that designs of the past have increasingly become recycled with modern twists, such as Arsenal’s recent ‘lightning bolts’ designs—of which there have been more than one—or Liverpool’s periodic returns to a plain red shirt with a round white collar and cuffs.
But this summer something unique has come together at Barnsley, where an eccentric design decision from the past has run head-first into the trend for kits that lean on the past for inspiration. The club’s new kit for this season is quite clearly based on the 1989/90 Barnsley kit, which had previously entered folklore as the most unusual since the club first made their switch to red and white in 1901. Only once before, between 1986 and 1988, had they had anything so bold as a single vertical stripe down one side of their plain red shirt.
This stripe was a tremor, a portent of what was to come. In 1988/89, the team wore red shorts. It was the first time since 1904 that they hadn’t worn white ones. And then the following year, courtesy of Beaver International, a sportswear company who supplied kits to a number of clubs throughout the 1990s and early 2000s (Bradford City were wearing Beaver shirts when they got promoted to the Premier League in 1999), came something quite startling, a red shirt with a big white yoke across the front of it, and a circle of six-pointed stars of varying sizes around the neckline.
It didn’t seem to do the team any good. They finished the 1989/90 season in 19th place in the Second Division, six points above the relegation places. The following season, they made an obvious change. The 1989/90 change kit had been an altogether more sober design, a v-neck in royal blue with sky blue piping. The following season, Beaver simply transposed red and white onto the template of the previous season’s away shirt, and inverted the colours for their away kit. They finished eighth in the Second Division, that season.
But now, 34 years on, it’s back. Beaver International are no more. They were liquidated in 2007, having fallen foul of an unpaid tax bill two years earlier. In 2023 the manufacturers are Puma, and rather than being a plain white yoke—and it should be pointed out that the white yoke on those 1989/90 shirts was only on the front of the shirts; as can be seen here, they were redder in action than they look from those head-on stylised pictures of them—they’ve gone for a gradient design, fading from top to the bottom.
And… I don’t hate it? If anything, it almost looks like a previously unseen USA third kit from the 1994 World Cup finals. The stars are a little extra, and it should be added that all this kerfuffle about the shirt has obscured the fact that they’re wearing red shorts for the only the second time in 120 years.
But it’s fun, and fun is fun. Everybody takes everything too goddam seriously, these days. I mean, I just spent a Thursday evening becoming one of this country’s leading authorities on Beaver International. I don’t really feel as though I’m in a position to assume moral authority over anybody on any subject, considering everything right now.
Of course there will be people who won’t like it. There are always people resistant to change, who just want red, white and red. And I do get it, I really do. It’s unfamiliar and unusual, and it absolutely, definitely was never going to please everyone. But it’s different, and everybody needs that, every once in a while. Let Barnsley have some fun. There are more important things in life to get aerated about, especially if you don’t even support the team concerned.