What makes for a good football strip? A number of
things, but distilled to its essence there are four primary concerns: colour, array,
trim, fit. Colour can be problematic as it can't really be tinkered with (unless
your team’s majority shareholder has other ideas). The array – or pattern, if
you prefer – tends to be more mutable, although radical alterations may invoke
the ire of any football club’s loyal fan base. Embellishments, such as those to
the collar and neckline, will vary from season to season, normally without so
much as a raised eyebrow. Finally, the way a kit is cut will only ever come
under close scrutiny if it’s noticeably out of keeping with prevailing trends –
for example, the shirt Kappa presented to the Italian national team for the 2000
UEFA European Championship, which had the players so spooked they insisted on
sizing up.
But wait, there’s something else to consider, something
that football purists would rather wasn’t there, but is so we must: the
football team’s sponsor writ large across the chest. It might seem odd that
something as ostensibly functional as text should amount to anything more than
a mere distraction, until one remembers that such monograms were in the first
instance designed to hold the eye. This is one of the reasons why the football
shirts A.C. Milan wore from 1987 through to 1992 are superior to those that came
immediately before and after.
The A.C. Milan of the early 1980s was in bad shape.
Saddled with debt, they’d not won a major trophy since their Serie A triumph of
1978-79 and had been relegated to Serie B twice (once as punishment for their
involvement in the Totonero
match-fixing scandal of 1980) which for a club of Milan’s standing
represented failure, not to say ignominy. That being said, the thinly striped jerseys
they played in during this period looked pretty good, especially the Oscar Mondadori sponsored edition that
the English paring of Ray Wilkins and Mark Hateley had the pleasure of wearing in
1984-85. Whether this acrylic sark was particularly comfortable is another matter.
Then in 1986 the media tycoon, politician, and former
crooner, Silvio Berlusconi decided to buy the club, paid off its debts and set
about the business of reviving its fortunes. Within a year he’d offloaded
Wilkins and Hateley and added the Dutch internationals Ruud Gullit and Marco
Van Basten to a squad that already contained the likes of Franco Baresi,
Roberto Donadoni, Pietro Virdis, Mauro Tassotti and a youthful Paulo Maldini. Only
then did Silvio Berlusconi consider who he wanted as coach, sacking the
incumbent Nils Liedholm in April and appointing Primavera manager Fabio Capello as caretaker while he made up his mind.
More than likely, Berlusconi had Arrigo Sacchi’s card
marked from the moment his team dumped Milan out of the Coppa Italia in the
second round. By summer the former Parma manager was in charge and proceeded
to bring in Carlo Ancelotti from Roma and Angelo Colombo from Udinese.
A.C. Milan won the league in 1987-88 by a three point
margin over reigning champions Napoli. They did this wearing a jersey provided by
Kappa that was quite different to the one the firm was supplying to Juventus over
in Turin. Made from polyester, rather than cotton, the Milan version had a shorter
collar and a shallower neckline. Moreover, whereas the sponsor’s name on Juve’s
kit was flocked, on Milan’s it was printed by way of a process known as dye-sublimation. (It should be noted that Italian
sportswear manufacturers were behind the curve in this respect, and I wonder
whether Berlusconi might have recognised this and persuaded Kappa to utilise more
up-to-date methods.) Then there was the sponsor itself – financial servicing
firm Mediolanum – with its name written
in a sans-serif, uppercase font and the company logo hovering above, all in
white. This simple text, resting neatly beneath the Kappa logo sewn to the
right, and a gold star (denoting 10 titles won) on the left, is almost as
recognisable as the colourway of the strip itself; one cannot conceive of the
shirt without it.
In 1988 the Italian football authorities allowed for
an extra foreign player, and Frank Rijkaard was invited to join his fellow Dutchmen
in Milan. All three of them had been instrumental in The Netherlands' victory in the
1988 UEFA European Championship in Germany that summer. With the scudetto now adorning
their chests they must have felt like a million dollars.
The 1988-89 season didn’t go entirely to plan. City
rivals Inter won the title, and comfortably so, while A.C. finished third behind
Napoli. But Serie A was no longer Berlusconi’s priority, the European Cup was,
and in that regard the season was a huge success. Despite wobbling against Red
Star Belgrade in the second round, the rossoneri went on to beat Steaua
București 4-0 in the final. Perhaps even more revealing was the 5-0 demolition
job they did on Real Madrid in the second leg of the semi-final.
Ostensibly, Milan’s strip remained the same for the
following year’s campaign, but there were a few subtle changes. As with
Juventus, Kappa still didn’t feel the need to append anything like a club crest
(although they afforded Sampdoria the privilege) but they did see fit to
attach an embroidered, celebratory image of the European Cup in place of the
previous season’s scudetto. Then there was the material itself, which now
incorporated a micropatterned matrix made up of hollow, inverted squares.
(Juventus’s shirt received the same treatment, but not Sampdoria’s.) AC Milan
finished 1989-90 second in the league, again behind Napoli, and retained the
European Cup, beating Benfica 1-0 in Vienna.
In 1990 Milan ended their association with Kappa
and signed a contract with Adidas. Under normal circumstances I’d finish this
article here, but the shirt Adidas came up with was so similar to Kappa’s that I
feel I must to go on. Adidas didn’t have much of a presence in Italy at the
time so maybe they wanted to avoid making a statement. They
didn’t even bother adding their name beneath their – admittedly, instantly
identifiable – trefoil logo. The micropatterning was removed and the neckline trimmed,
but in every other respect the jersey was very much the same: same colour, same
collar, same width of stripe, same patron, same embroidered European Cup motif.
The move to Adidas did not immediately pay dividends.
A.C. Milan were Serie A runners-up for a consecutive season – this time trailing
Sampdoria – and were knocked out of the European Cup by Marseille in the
quarter-finals. (Arrigo Sacchi subsequently accepted an offer to manage the
Italian national team, and Fabio Capello was appointed in his place.) This
meant that for 1991-92 Milan’s shirt would for the first time in three years
be reduced to displaying a solitary star.
Or it would have had they not decided to fill the void
with a depiction of the Intercontinental Cup that they’d won the year prior, positioned
beside the star rather than under. When Red Star Belgrade beat Chilean side
Colo-Colo in December to claim the same trophy, A.C. were obliged to get rid of
it. Instead, they saw out the season with club crest attached to the jersey. By
May, the rossoneri had been crowned
champions again, unbeaten and eight points clear of second placed Juventus.
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1990-91
Italian confectioner Motta succeeded Mediolanum as
club sponsor, and the year after Italian sportswear manufacturer Lotto wrestled
control from a reticent Adidas. ‘Motta’ lacked the graphic subtlety of
‘Mediolanum’, whereas Lotto relied too heavily on dye-sublimation, refusing to sew
key details into the fabric the way their predecessors did – be it the Kappa or
Adidas logos, the scudetto, the European Cup, that solitary star – which made
their shirts look cheap.
But five years in pretty much the same shirt was good
going, even back then. If you had to narrow it down then the Kappa version
probably edges it over Adidas’s effort – the 1988-89 iteration in particular,
with the scudetto contrasting nicely against the red and black stripes of A.C. Milan.
In any case, Arrigo Sacchi’s team more than lived up
to the standard this iconic top conferred upon them.
