Our third guest blog is by renowned football author John Devlin, writer of cultish kit book ‘True Colours’. Here, he recalls his earliest fascination with football shirts.

John Devlin

“My love of football kits began back in 1978 when I borrowed the Observer Book of Football from my local library. This small, inconspicuous tome included a few pages depicting shirt colours of every current British league team at the time. This fascinated me and from then on I was often found carefully drawing and colouring football kits on the scraps of paper and cereal boxes.

I realised early on that kit designs changed, although of course back then the alterations, on the whole, were much more infrequent then they are today meaning that when a new design was worn it caused, for us few kit aficionados, a real sense of excitement. When the continental kit revolution of 1980 arrived and a new wave of slick, shiny strips appeared in the English game I reached for my felt tip pens in earnest. Sponsorship and pinstripes only made the designs better (for some reason, I LOVED seeing sponsors logos on shirts – still do in fact!) although replicating them with primitive felt tip pens caused me no end of grief.

Back then, as a young lad, I was a Liverpool fan – this was back in the era of Dalglish, Souness, McDermott etc when the Anfield side were the only sensible choice for a small boy getting into football for the first time. And it was a Liverpool kit that really ignited my passion and, some would say obsession, for football kits.

John's favoruite Liverpool kids

As I mentioned although I knew and accepted that kit designs changed, Read the rest of this entry »