The Colour on the Back of Your Shirt Has Nothing to Do With Football

Think about the colour of your team's kit. Really think about it. You probably feel something about it – a quiet pride, a mild contempt for the opposition's shade, a vague conviction that yours is simply the correct one. Now consider that it was most likely chosen by a Victorian gentleman who had leftover fabric, a decent relationship with a textile merchant, and absolutely no idea that anyone would still be arguing about it a hundred and fifty years later.

How did heraldry end up deciding football kits?

The story of why sports teams wear the colours they do is not, it turns out, a sporting story at all. It starts in the Middle Ages with feudal lords who dressed their household servants in their family colours – what we'd call livery. If you worked for the Duke of so-and-so, you wore his colours. If you fought for him, same again. The colours were identity made visible, a system that told everyone within eyesight exactly whose man you were. It was the same impulse that drove the complex, class-loaded history of colour as social signal in clothing generally: the way certain shades were effectively owned by the wealthy, the powerful, the titled. You can read some of that history here: The Colour That Took Five Hundred Years to Stop Being an Embarrassment.

The Public Schools and Universities

When the great English public schools and universities started organising competitive sport in the nineteenth century, they reached for the same logic. A college needed something to mark its rowing eight or its cricket eleven as distinct from the college down the river. They had house colours already, so they used those. Oxford went dark blue because someone apparently matched the ribbon a Christchurch student had borrowed from a shop in 1829. Cambridge went light blue. Neither colour had anything to do with rowing.

The clubs that grew out of those institutions, or were founded by their alumni, carried the colours with them. And when professional football began in the 1880s and someone needed to order jerseys quickly and cheaply, they ordered what was available in the colours they already used. The supplier had claret and blue in stock. Claret and blue it is. Forever.

Why “Forever” Is the Odd Part

That "forever" is the genuinely odd part. Clubs have changed cities, stadiums, owners, leagues, and continents. They've gone bankrupt and been reformed. Players have come and gone in their thousands. The one thing that has barely moved is the colour. Partly that's sentiment, but partly it's something more banal: each generation of fans has grown up with the colour, wrapped their identity around it, and would riot – sometimes literally – if it changed. The shade becomes load-bearing. It stops being a choice anyone is actively making and becomes just the way things are.

So next time you feel that small flicker of tribal belonging when your team runs out, enjoy it. It's real, even if the reason for it traces back to a duke's wardrobe and a Tuesday afternoon in a textile warehouse.