Thursday, March 20, 2008

Football Kit Blog Book Review: True Colours by John Devlin


I recently got this great book from amazon uk. It is called True Colours: Football Kits from 1980 to the Present Day, by John Devlin. It is a must have for any football kit enthusiast. The only pity here is that there are not more volumes of this masterpiece covering all the clubs from all over the world. For it's slim size, it is a very impressive work in breadth and scope. It basically details every home, away, 3rd, and 4th kits of every English Premier League side that was in the top flight in 2005-06, spanning back to 1980. Along with the artwork for each kit there is a brief description of who made the kit, who the shirt sponsor was, a brief story about the shirt, and in what important matches it was worn in and by whom. Going through the pages you really get an understanding for trends in design, fabric, and colors that have taken place over the last few decades. Also, I realized that the Golden Age of Football shirt design was the late 80's/early 90's. There were just so many innovations that took place back then that we take for granted today. There are some really great shirts in here, like Arsenal's "bruised banana" shirt (I couldn't tell you why, but I love that shirt) as well as Manchester United's groundbreaking "Newton Heath" shirt. There are some real disasters here too like Chelsea's tangerine nightmare and this vomit-inducing number from Spurs.

If you are into this kind of stuff, you should not go without this book. I am hooked and just put in my order for Volume 2.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello - Just found your site and I have to say I'm very flattered by your kind words about my book. Its much appreciated. You might be interested in my site: www.truecoloursfootballkits.com
Keep up the good work with your site. All the best. John Devlin

A. Kane said...

Hi John, it's an honor having you stop by. After this post, I went ahead and bought volume 2...I can only imagine the amount of work that went into putting together both books, thanks so much for putting them out.
Had already checked out your site, thanks. I will be putting it up on my blog roll shortly.

It's hard to post frequently when you have a full–time job, but having you stop by and write those kind words is certainly inspiration to push on!

Feel free to drop me a line if you are ever in New York!

Football kits said...

I hope in the next book we can read about the history of football kits from the other countries