Leeds kits: Seductive, controversial, political, iconic and profitable – but which is your favourite away shirt? - The Athletic 24/7/21
By Phil Hay
Second only to the clamour for transfer news at Leeds United
is the clamour for details of the kit launch each summer. The ball starts
rolling as the clocks go forward and hits top speed towards the middle of July,
or whenever the club pull back the curtains.
For many years the impending designs were easy for commercial
staff to guard. It was not always possible to prevent minor leaks and in one
particular summer a journalist in Yorkshire was disciplined for posting a
photograph of Leeds’ new home shirt on a fans’ forum before the official
unveiling but nothing was so challenging as Twitter’s resourcefulness. Leeds’
latest kit, for the 2021-22 season, went on sale on Thursday. By then it had
already been photographed in a sports shop in Manchester.
This, though, is one of United’s most lucrative commercial
markets. It was not for no reason that Massimo Cellino risked legal action from
Macron by ditching the Italian sportswear brand in 2015 and signing up Kappa to
supply Leeds with kit instead, severing Macron’s contract in the process.
Cellino reasoned that Kappa’s products would be better quality and more
attractive on the retail front. That turned out to be true and in the club’s
promotion season, shirt sales of 130,000 vastly outstripped the rest of the
Championship and many of the teams in the Premier League.
Last year, with Adidas providing the merchandise, that
figure increased to 250,000 and almost every last top found a buyer. It was
apparent within weeks of the kit’s release that the board at Leeds had
underestimated public demand but they deliberately erred on the side of caution
because the order submitted to Adidas was drawn up before promotion was
guaranteed. There was a danger of being left with excess stock if the club were
stuck in the Championship and the financial risk was too high to take. This summer
Leeds were able to acquire more bulk with another top-flight year ahead (and
sales in the first 24 hours on Thursday were up 19 per cent on last year).
Consistently impressive figures count when it comes to consolidating their
relationship with a firm like Adidas.
The club’s shirt, like their badge, has evolved in striking
fashion over the past century. From blue and white stripes through a series of
combinations of blue and amber, the colours of the city of Leeds, it took Don
Revie’s insistence on an all-white kit for their modern guise to take hold.
Leeds had played in white in the season before Revie’s appointment as
player-manager, 1960-61, but he was taken with the look. He wanted to dress
like Real Madrid, the story goes, and aimed to play like them too. The late
Earl of Harewood, Leeds’ president between 1961 and 2011, was quoted in the
book “Revie: Revered and Reviled” as saying that Revie “did definitely change
the team colours to show his desire to make Leeds United a success”.
Leeds have been largely faithful to their white home kit ever since. Certain designs went a little off the beaten track, like the unpopular 2013-14 shirt which carried a blue racing stripe down the front, but the club have generally known better than to dispense with a long tradition. Some of the designs and sponsors are synonymous with moments in time and others with individual players: the Yorkshire Evening Post top with the 1991-92 title win, Strongbow with the Champions League run under David O’Leary, Top Man with Gary Speed and the start of the Howard Wilkinson era, Thistle Hotels with Tony Yeboah, Burton with John Sheridan. The charcoal-and-pink away kit released in 2019-20 will forever be remembered as the shirt Pablo Hernandez tore off after his winning goal against Swansea City (below).
Charcoal and pink was a brave choice and a mix of colours which followed the modern fashion of away kits. As John Devlin, an author and expert on the history of football shirts, likes to say, clubs with commercial aims in the retail department cannot merely target a traditional market or a traditional audience. One of Leeds’ more popular releases, and one of the more difficult to acquire today, was the Lazio-esque blue design from 1999-2000, a gem of a creation. Leeds were aware of much criticism of the charcoal and pink idea when it was first exposed to the public eye but within months it had become their best-ever selling away kit (albeit rapidly beaten by last season’s as the arrival of Adidas sent business through the roof). From time to time, it pays to be bold and Leeds’ accounts for the 2019-20 financial year list merchandising as almost 30 per cent of their total income.
Promotion to the Premier League 12 months ago also gave Leeds access to more weighty sponsorship, including a shirt deal with bookmakers SBOTOP which is worth around £7 million a year (up from £750,000 paid by 32Red in the Championship). As the kit market evolved through the decades, so too did the world of branding: primary sponsors, secondary sponsors, sleeve sponsors, short sponsors, sock sponsors. And all of it is governed by FA rules. Leeds branded their own kit for the first time in 1981, securing a deal with local electrical firm RF Winder, but it was not until the mid-90s when the board truly struck gold through a £19 million agreement with Puma and Packard Bell, negotiated by the persuasive Bill Fotherby.
Manufacturers also became more prominent and noticeable as
the kit market became hot. Umbro’s emblem crept onto Leeds’ shirts and those of
a handful of other clubs around 1973. After striking a partnership of its own
with United a short while later, Admiral took the plunge before the 1976-77
season by adding striking blue and yellow trim to the usual white canvas. It
was, to an extent, the end of the all-white era and a shift towards more
imaginative patterning.
Only once in the past 40 years, during the 2015-16
Championship season, have Leeds donned an unbranded shirt. A fall-out between
Cellino and the club’s main sponsor, Enterprise Insurance, left the front of
their strips blank until 32Red stepped in a year later. Enterprise and its
owner, Andrew Flowers, had threatened to withdraw their support six months
earlier after Cellino’s aborted attempt to sack former manager Brian McDermott.
The company accused Cellino of bringing Leeds into disrepute. Flowers had
another dog in the fight, however, having failed with an attempt to buy control
of the club before Cellino completed his own takeover.
In microcosm, Leeds are a representation of all the things a
football kit can be: seductive, controversial, political, iconic and
profitable. The best of them are timeless. The worst of them beg the question
of who needs banning from Microsoft Paint. There are replica shirts for most of
us and there is now a certainty that every summer we will be back here, waiting
for the colours to drop. The Strongbow kit was a watershed moment, the last
time Leeds wore the same home kit for two seasons running. Money talks and
those days are gone.