THE SARTORIAL ELEGANCE OF SERIE A: A.S. BARI, 1990-92 [ADIDAS]

Adidas has been a provider of football kits since such firms made it palpably clear that they were providing them (in the 1970s). Indeed, Adidas were one of the first companies to do so, appending their three-striped motif to the shoulders of the football shirts they provided, as well as their instantly recognisable ‘trefoil’ logo to the chest (as distinct from the rather bland ‘3 bar’ emblem they’ve been utilising since the early 1990s).

Despite a visible presence on the international scene, Adidas were not back then the dominant presence they are today, and this would have been especially true in Italy. That said, by the early 1980s there were three Italian teams of reasonable repute being supplied kit by the German conglomerate: Hellas Verona, Torino F.C. and A.S. Bari. Verona won their 1984-85 scudetto wearing Adidas – and very nice shirts they were too – in an association that lasted from 1983 through to 1987, whereupon the Veronese switched allegiance to Hummel. Torino worked with Adidas from 1984 to 1988 before hooking up with ABM, winning nothing. But Bari got there first and stayed with Adidas for the longest: from 1981 all the way through to 1997.

White football kits aren’t the most interesting and rely upon a tasteful splash of colour, or some other quirk, to liven them up. Real Madrid’s all-white strip was improved immeasurably when purple trim was added in the early 1980s. Leeds United, who modelled their strip on Real Madrid’s at Don Revie’s behest, found salvation by way of the wonderfully bizarre badge they introduced in 1973 (and jettisoned for something more conservative in 1977).

Bari’s colours are white with red trim. It’s not the most exciting of juxtapositions, but in the hands of Adidas it was made to work. Their earliest effort adhered to the traditional format: three red stripes running off the shoulder and the trefoil on the chest. In 1983 vertical pinstripes were added – in red, naturally – to be replaced in 1984 with thicker, horizontal stripes across the shoulders and thinner ones beneath. Then in 1985 – as Englishmen abroad Paul Rideout and Gordon Cowans joined the club – Adidas reintroduced the pinstripes.

Or did they? That season – 1985-86 – Bari were furnished with no less than five different shirts: the default white, pinstriped affair; a red, diagonally pinstriped shirt, presumably to be worn against opposition wearing white (clubs were not obliged back then to wear their second strip away from home); a blue iteration in case the red one didn’t suffice; a white, pinstriped shirt with red shoulder-panelling and sleeves; a red, pinstriped shirt with white shoulder-panelling and sleeves. It appears that those last two were issued for the winter months, but why they were adopted at all I have no idea. All these jerseys were pleasingly sponsored by Cassa di Risparmio di Puglia, written across the chest in an arc to make room for the bank’s insignia.

Perhaps bored of these striated schematics, Adidas then reverted to supplying Bari with an all-white strip (allowing for the three-stripes down the shoulder and the sides of the shorts, the trefoil logo, and a red collar) and would continue doing so for the next four years. The one constant throughout all of this was Bari’s tidy club crest: a cockerel in profile, rendered with modernist simplicity by graphic designer Piero Gratton.

In 1989 A.S. Bari gained promotion from Serie B into Serie A. The following year they were hosting World Cup football at their new home, the impressive Stadio San Nicola.

It was around this period that Adidas decided that their three-stripe template needed shaking up. They proceeded cautiously, introducing a variety of configurations, many of which ended up on display at the 1990 World Cup. The strange, fragmented design that adorned the shirts of Czechoslovakia and the USSR, for example, must have been deemed a failure for it was swiftly abandoned. Strangely, the top in which West Germany won the tournament did not prove to be indicative of the direction Adidas wished to take. Nor those provided for Yugoslavia, Columbia, or for the USA and Romania. The shirts given to Cameroon and Egypt, on the other hand, became something of an Adidas staple, worn by the likes of Olympique Marseille, Anderlecht, Bayern Munich, and the Republic of Ireland (although not at Italia ’90). And then there was what the United Arab Emirates were wearing, which was also what France, Poland and Ghana wore, except France, Poland and Ghana hadn’t qualified for the 1990 World Cup. It was this template that Adidas would use at Bari for the next two seasons.

In truth this new wave of football shirt couture rarely delivered – overly complicated patterns rarely do in this context. Yet it somehow worked at Bari. In fact, Bari’s strip was pretty much identical to that of the UAE and is almost impossible to describe. The body of the shirt is white but the area covering the shoulders, and running diagonally towards the neck, is red, except on the top of the shoulders, which is white save for three red (Adidas) stripes sublimated over the top. Along the boundary between the red on the shoulder and the white of the trunk there are three hollow parallelograms running diagonally upwards either side of the chest, their outlines inverted. Sleeves are red on the outer side and white underneath the arm. Shorts and socks are white and exhibit Adidas’s obligatory red trim.

What really sets the kit off nicely, though, is the sponsor’s name, Sud Factoring, all lower case, printed in what looks like Goudy Heavy Face. And Bari’s badge, positioned just below the clavicle so as not to interfere with those parallelograms (as is Adidas’s trefoil geometrically opposite).

David Platt

Bari’s tenure in Serie A would be short-lived. In 1990-91 they finished in 13th place, four points above the relegation zone. They had some fairly decent players – Giovanni Loseto in defence, Pietro Maiellaro in midfield, João Paulo up front – and in ’91 brought in Daniele Fortunato from Juventus, Zvonimir Boban on loan from AC Milan, and David Platt from Aston Villa. To no avail. A. S. Bari were relegated, Adidas hung around for a couple more seasons, whereafter Lotto filled the void, and the shirt went downhill from there.

THE SARTORIAL ELEGANCE OF SERIE A: JUVENTUS, 1991-94 [KAPPA]

When Ian Rush finally joined up with Juventus in the summer of 1987, after being loaned back to Liverpool for the previous season, Michel Platini informed the Welshman he’d arrived two, maybe three years too late and that the club was entering a period of transition. Most of the players Rush had played, and lost, against in the European Cup Final two years earlier had moved on – Zbigniew Boniek, Paolo Rossi, Maro Tardelli, etc. – while Platini himself had confirmed his retirement. Antonio Cabrini and club captain Gaetano Scirea were still present but well past their prime, Scirea having just turned 34. They did have Michael Laudrup, but he was not at this point anywhere near being the player he would later become at Barcelona.

What might also have frustrated Rush was the fact that his new shirt was a museum piece in comparison to the natty number he’d been wearing at Liverpool. Italian sportswear companies were slow to more on from acrylic, and although the current shirt wasn’t unattractive, it would have seemed relatively heavy and overly long. Just to really rub it in, no sooner had Rush returned to Liverpool than Kappa got their act together and started utilising contemporary fabrics.

The change in material did not have an immediate impact on Juventus’s form. Nor did the arrival of Portuguese Rui Barros or Ukrainian Oleksandr Zavarov. What did appear to signal an upward turn in the club’s fortune was the acquisition of Salvatore Schillaci from Messina, Pierluigi Casiraghi from Monza, and taking on department-store chain Upim as patron in place of home-appliance manufacturer Ariston. 1989-90 was a good season for the ‘Old Lady’ that saw them lift both the Coppa Italia, narrowly beating AC Milan, and the UEFA Cup, comfortably beating Fiorentina.

The jersey in which Juventus ended their three year barren spell incorporated hollow, inverted, micropatterned squares forming part of a larger matrix of hollow, inverted, micropatterned squares (what's technically known as a 'jacquard'). It was a nice shirt but suffered from a lack of colour, and the absence of the club’s crest; in its place, just two gold stars signifying over 20 scudetti won. When the actual scudetto – or even the coccarda – adorned the shirt, then it became a thing of great beauty.

Despite winning two trophies, Juventus had come no nearer to landing the championship, finishing fourth, and manager Dino Zoff was shown the door. He was not alone: Zavarov was out, as was Belarusian Sergei Aleinikov, who’d only lasted one season, and so too Rui Barros, who moved on to Monaco. The new coach, Luigi Maifredi, brought with him defender Marco Antonio De Marchi from Bologna, and was also provided with World Cup winning midfielder Thomas Häßler, Brazilian defender Júlio César, and attacking midfielder, and national hero, Roberto Baggio, who claimed his transfer from Fiorentina had been forced upon him.

1990-91 did not go as planned, for which Maifredi paid the ultimate price. However, as winners of the previous year’s Coppa Italia, Juventus bore the coccarda. Moreover, Kappa decided that their company’s logo – the silhouette of a man and woman sat back-to-back – should now be coloured green. This minor detail meant that when the coccarda was absent the following season the shirt maintained its visual interest. Indeed, it seemed to look better without the scudetto or the coccarda, the green Kappa logo on the right side singularly complementing the two gold stars on the left.

In the meantime Juventus had reappointed Giovanni Trapattoni as coach, the man who had previously guided the club to six titles within nine years (the period Platini was referring to when lecturing Rush). In his first season in charge Juventus finished second in the league behind champions AC Milan. In 1992, food producer Danone took over as sponsor and the shirt’s V-neck was trimmed, otherwise the kit remained very much the same. Trapattoni then guided Juventus to their second UEFA Cup victory in four years, beating Borussia Dortmund 6-1 on aggregate, and then in 1993-94 finished Serie A as runners up – again losing out to AC Milan – before ‘Trap’ left to take over at Bayern Munich.

1991-92

Depending on how you like your collars and fonts will determine which iteration of this kit you prefer. Personally, I think the Upim version edges it. In any case, the phlegmatic Frenchman was right: Juventus had been a team in transition. By the time they secured the title in 1995, under the stewardship of Marcello Lippi, Kappa had ditched their green insignia, reverting to black, and started doing terrible things to their shirts’ neckline. Lotto would soon take over as supplier, and later Nike, but neither would come close to offering the simplicity and purity of design Kappa provided during this transitory phase in the early 1990s.