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| The new World Cup first kit |
Two things incensed me enough to reach for the laptop and blog again. First the price. Apparently the new shirt is going to retail at £90. Yes, £90. That is nothing short of disgraceful. One footballer, QPR's Joey Barton, commented on his twitter page: "£90 for the new England shirt is taking the mickey out of the fans. When will it stop? Appalling. Football again allows commercialism to eat away at its soul. Something has got to give."
Quite right. Shadow Sports Minister Clive Efford was also quoted as attacking not only the price but the frequency with which kits are changed nowadays, which is the second thing I find unacceptable.
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| The new World Cup second kit |
The latest (until now) England kit was unveiled only last May. That means it has lasted less than a year. That's just seven England football games. When it was launched (Nike had taken over the contract from Umbro) I naively assumed what they had come up with would at least see us through to the World Cup.
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| The kits that lasted less than a year |
As I sat bemusing the shoddy state of football nowadays I was reminded of some comments made by Bob Wilson, the former Arsenal goalkeeper, who hosted the Saturday lunchtime Football Focus programme on BBC1 for twenty-odd years. Bob, who I think trained as a schoolteacher before taking up football, was always an articulate man who made sensible comments worth listening to.
I remember one occasion him bemoaning the fact that many teams now (this was probably in the 80s or, at a push, early 90s) changed their kits every three years or so. It would, he pointed out, put a burden on parents, whose footballing-loving offspring naturally wanted their favourite team's latest kit.
Every three years or so. Look at what happens now. It is, indeed, an indication of the awful creeping commercialism that, as Barton put it, is eating away at the soul of the game. What would Bob make of the scandalous state of kit changes today?
