Preview of Premiership's New Names & Numbers

It looks like England's Premier League will launch their new name & number system on May 15th. I found this neat graphic illustrating the change, which I definitely think is a huge step forward. The new numbers are a lot more sleek than the previous version. The change also addresses one big problem with the old font, which was that the 1 and the 7 looked very similar. Kudos to England, I think these numbers look so good, I'm willing to overlook for the time being that England doesn't have an "open" shirt number policy. I'm strongly in favor of teams being able to choose their own fonts, but I also believe there needs to be some regulations and oversight so the disaster that Sevilla FC has been this season can be avoided at all costs.

Ajax Switch Things Up

On April 1st Ajax Amsterdam in a match against Heracles wore a special one-off kit. I noticed it on Tuesday when I was watching eredivisie highlights on Fox Soccer Channel. The kit is identical to the one they usually wear in the Dutch league save for the advertising on the shirt. For God knows how long Ajax have been sponsored by Dutch bank ABN-AMRO. In fact the only other sponsor I could think of Ajax having was TDK way back.

I couldn't make out what the advertising said on the highlights so I did a little digging and found out it was a one-off shirt to introduce ABN-AMRO's new mortgage branch Florius. The whole story can be found here. Also mentioned in that piece is that Ajax have done this before in 2003, which I didn't know about. There's not much to say about the change since it's not really a major one. The most important thing is that they preserved the tradition of aligning the lettering on the Ajax shirt vertically. Tradition is good.

Another interesting note from Holland is that Feyenoord has introduced their new kits for the 2007/08 season. Not much of a change on the home, but the new away kit is quite new and fresh.