Newcastle United, which made its ignominious exit from the Premiership at the end of last season, has done its players, staff, fans and the human eye a serious disservice by rolling out the new away uniforms for the 2009-2010 season. The kit, with a yellow-and-white verticle striped jersey, yellow shorts and yellow-and-white horizontal striped socks, has been heralded as a uniform living up to the level of suck the club achieved on the field.
The headlines in the English press that accompanied the rollout are a tribute to sports headline writing.
The Independent
“Newcastle hit new low with horror away kit”
Daily Mirror
“Newcastle United’s new away kit… and the worst football kits ever”
Daily Telegraph
“Newcastle unveil ‘awful’ yellow away kit”
The Sun
“And you thought relegation was bad!”
Local paper The Evening Chronicle went to the fans, who roundly gave the thumbs-down to the new outfit. Supporter Stephen Buchan nailed it when he said, “It’s awful. It reminds me of a deckchair on Blackpool beach. At a time when NUFC need all the money they can get, they go and release a kit that Mike Ashley would probably struggle to sell at rock bottom price in one of his cheap clothing outlets. It’s not as though we fans have been made to look stupid enough without being asked to fork out good money to wear something as awful as that.”
Buchan’s issue, well beyond thinking about the players looking silly on the pitch, is how the club’s fans will look while tooling around town. Constantly updating uniforms is one of the oldest hustles of soccer clubs, and can end up with such results as pictured above.
Our club, Chelsea, is certainly not left out of that mix. When we were spending a few months in South Kensington, we walked over to Stamford Bridge and went shopping at the Chelsea megastore (hey, it was the middle of summer — no games until late August). Throughout the store were mementos of seasons past, including different jerseys. One, an away jersey from the ’80s, was one of the ugliest things ever to have been seen on a playing surface. The club, which is known by its blue color, with bits of white and yellow, put out a kit composed of hunter’s vest orange and sweatshirt-style heather gray.
Newcastle still has a ways to go to achieve that level of horrible.
