As is often the case, Cremonese haven’t always worn
their current colours. In 1903, the year the club came together, they wore
white shirts adorned with a lilac collar, paired with black shorts and socks.
Cremonese was a mere sporting association back then, and it’s not even certain
they played any football. This changed in 1910, around the time they changed their name to Unione Sportiva Cremonese. Football was catching on, and the
following year the team appointed a coach by the name of Nino Gandelli, with
aim of playing the sport competitively. It seems he took the role seriously
enough, recruiting the best local talent he could find, and by 1912 they'd
signed up with the Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio (FICG).
Ahead of the 1913-14 Promozione, U.S. Cremonese merged
with the recently formed Associazione Calcio Cremona. A new strip was in order,
and it was towards the city’s heraldry that they looked for inspiration.
Cremona’s coat of arms consists of a shield split down the middle, with silver
and red horizontal stripes on one side and on the other a depiction of an arm holding
aloft a golden ball. For now, the
colours would do: grey shirts with red trim, to be worn with white shorts.
Cremonese’s first season was a success, winning
promotion into the Prima Categoria at the first attempt. The following year’s
campaign was mediocre, and when Italy joined The Great War in 1915 so did many
of their players (most notably goalkeeper Giovanni Zini, who served as a
stretcher-bearer but died in Cividale del Friuli in 1915 after contracting typhus).
In 1919, Cremonese assimilated another local team by
the name of Football Club Aurora. Despite bolstering their ranks the club
finished bottom of their six-team group, which ordinarily would have resulted
in relegation back to the Promozione. The Prima Categoria was in effect a
qualifying round whereby teams competed in regional divisions to gain entry into
the national semi-finals. The regional committees operated with complete
autonomy, determining how many teams over however many leagues were allowed to
take part. Ahead of the 1920-21 season, rather than reduce the number of
entrants, as the FICG and a few of the bigger clubs were keen to do, Lombardia
elected to move from three groups of six to six groups of four, making room for Cremonese.
The next five years were spent playing in a
restructured Prima Divisione. Then in 1926 tensions between the FICG and
Confederazione Calcistica Italiana (CCI) finally gave way to the
establishment of a national league, under the auspices of the (Fascist) Direttorio
Divisioni Superiori (DDS). At the same time Cremonese embellished their
grey shirts with a red cross, only to finish their group in ninth place. Once
more, this should have been low enough to see them relegated, but an enforced
merger between Sampierdarenese and Andrea Doria (albeit a temporary one) freed
up and extra space.
In 1928 Cremonese tinkered with their strip for a third
time, exchanging the cross for a horizontal stripe wrapped around the chest. Seventh
place was enough to qualify for the preceding season’s inaugural single-group
format – in other words, Serie A – from which they were immediately relegated. They
continued to play in Serie B up until 1938, whereupon they dropped down into
Serie C. In 1942 Cremonese returned to Serie B but were again relegated in 1951.
For their 50th anniversary, they wore grey and red quartered shirts
before finally settling for the stripes worn to this day.
In 1984 Cremonese finally made a return to Serie A
after a 54 year absence. Unfortunately, the man who scored most of the goals that
got them there – a certain Gianluca Vialli – was subsequently sold to Sampdoria.
His replacement, the Brazilian forward Juary, made little impact and the club
finished bottom of the table. But Cremonese appeared to have turned a corner
and over the course of the next decade were promoted to Serie A on four separate occasions, oscillating between the top two tiers of Italian football. In the
first instance their gear had been supplied by Puma. The second time around it was ABM
(1988-89) and then Patrick (1990-91). For 1992-93’s successful push for
promotion the kit was supplied by German sports manufacturer Uhlsport.
Uhlsport made shirts for a number of Italian football
teams in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, most notably Inter and Bologna, as well
as Verona and Brescia. They all came with collars, as did most shirts tailored
towards the Italian market at that time. In truth, the jersey Uhlsport came up with was not so different to the ones that ABM and
Patrick had provided before them. There were, however, a few compelling disparities.
First off, ABM and Patrick never bothered with
appending the club’s crest. In ABM’s case, this may have come down to
financial expediency, given that ABM were attaching crests to the shirts of
Fiorentina, Torino, Pescara, Palermo. In any case, the absence of a badge
cheapened the jersey. Moreover, Cremonese had redesigned their crest in 1985, and
it was worthy of attachment: a simplified rendering of a golden ball held
aloft, as depicted in the city’s coat of arms, with a diagonal red and grey
bend (sinister) behind it. (When Uhlsport handed over to Puma in 1997, the club
reverted to its traditional emblem.)
Second, the team’s sponsors during Patrick and ABM’s
tenures did not present as nicely as the one that adorned the Uhlsport shirts –
local retailer Moncart. It’s not that the company name was written in a
particularly distinctive font, just that the simplicity of Moncart’s sans-serif,
uppercase lettering worked well in this instance.
Finally, Uhlsport had recently discovered the art of
micro-patterning. To be fair, this was a relatively recent phenomenon, and it’s
debatable whether Inter’s shirt would have benefitted from it, but in the case
of Cremonese it combined well with the colours, muting them slightly.
