Pick up an old World Cup shirt from the 1970s today and you understand at once why players looked like they had swum across a lake by the final whistle. Heavy, wet, clinging. How we got from there to feather light, sublimation printed high-tech fabric is one of the most fascinating and least told stories in sport.
From the wool shirt to the high-tech kit, a journey of more than 150 years.
Wool, cotton and wet shirts: the beginnings (1860 to 1920)
The first footballers wore what men in mid nineteenth century England simply wore: long wool shirts with collars, often in dark colours. Teams told each other apart by coloured caps, not by kits. Numbers? None. Logos? None. Club identity? A stripe of colour at best.
The biggest problem was rain. Wool and cotton soaked up moisture like a sponge. A drenched shirt could weigh two to three kilos more than a dry one. Players literally ran around the pitch with a wet sack of wool on their backs. The comfort of today's polyester blends was still decades away.
Club colours and the first television picture (1920 to 1960)
Between the wars, clubs developed fixed colour identities. Shirts got V necks instead of collars, and both cut and material became a little lighter. In 1939 the English Football League became the first organisation to make numbers compulsory, not for the fans but so that referees could identify players.
In 1954 television broadcast a World Cup for the first time. Suddenly millions of people could see what players were wearing. The shirt became a stage. Club and federation officials understood that colours and design were no longer only a way of telling teams apart. They were a brand.
Polyester, three stripes and the shirt sponsor (1960 to 1985)
The first polyester fabrics appeared in 1966. At the 1970 World Cup in Mexico several teams already wore polyester shirts: lighter, quick drying, more intense in colour than anything before. Adidas and Nike saw the potential and started signing supply deals with national teams. The 1974 World Cup in Germany brought fully branded kits, three stripes, the swoosh. The commercial era of the football shirt had begun.
In 1977 Kettering Town became the first English professional club to print a sponsor on its shirt, and caused a scandal in the process. The FA was against it, the rest of Europe was fascinated. Five years later shirt sponsorship was normal across the continent. The shirt was no longer just sportswear. It was advertising space, a revenue stream, a statement.
"When millions of people started buying shirts, not to wear them but to own them, everything changed."
The nineties: cult, kitsch and the wildest kits of all time
The 1990s are the high culture of kit design. Bold, colourful, sometimes absurd, and unforgotten to this day. Nigeria's green, white and gold kit at the 1994 World Cup in the USA became the best selling shirt of the entire tournament. Mexico in Aztec graphics. Denmark's red check. Cameroon's lion print. It was the first decade in which the shirt itself became a statement: a fashion object, an expression of identity, a collector's piece.
Technically the decade mattered just as much. In 1991 Nike launched Dri-FIT, the first genuinely functional moisture management in a sports fabric. The fibres were engineered to move sweat away from the body instead of letting it cling to the cloth. A turning point for performance. And the beginning of the end for the wet wool shirt.
In the nineties replica kits became a mass product. Clubs earned more from selling shirts to fans than from some player transfers. That changed how designers thought: memorable beats functional.
The twenty first century: sublimation, ultra thin and recycling
In the early 2000s sublimation printing spread through professional football. The technique had existed for a while, but only now was it precise enough for complex World Cup designs. In sublimation the colour is burned into the polyester fibre under heat rather than printed on top. The result does not fade, does not crack, does not peel. It is not a layer on the fabric, it is part of the fabric.
At the 2002 World Cup some jerseys weighed under 100 grams. In Brazil in 2014, where conditions were extreme, teams wore shirts with ultra thin mesh panels, strategic ventilation channels and laser cut holes for airflow. Every gram was a design decision. And in 2010 Nike began producing shirts from recycled PET bottles: since then the company has turned more than six billion bottles into fabric.
The World Cups of 2022 and 2026 show the pendulum swinging back to retro designs, but on high-tech material. Croatia's chequerboard, Morocco's arabesques, Japan's origami patterns. The material is minimal and functional, the design rich and full of meaning. Having both at once was not possible before.
Retro designs on modern high-tech material: the circle closes.
What 150 years of kit history mean for your club
The remarkable thing about this story: every innovation once reserved for professional clubs becomes standard for everyone twenty to thirty years later. Polyester, sublimation, individual design, short lead times, all available today from a single piece, with no supply contract and no minimum order.
What once required a kit deal with Adidas now takes a few clicks online. And the quality? Sublimation printed ProCore fabric, the kind we use at NOKTO, is not "almost as good" as professional cloth. It is the same printing technology, the same principle, the same durability.
Design your kit the way the pros do
Full design control. Sublimation printing on ProCore fabric. Names, numbers, logos, all in one configurator. From a single piece.
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