Grail Football Shirts: Holland 1988 Home by adidas

The Design

Something changed in the 1980s, football shirt design wasn’t just about making sure the players could distinguish between friend and foe on the pitch, it was about getting the kits in front of fans and ultimately making a few sales. adidas did this to perfection at Euro 1988.

In 1987 a new geometric football shirt was designed by adidas and distributed initially as the new West Germany away kit (green). It was soon popular amongst the designers and the template was made available for other National teams including the Soviet Union (red) and Holland (orange). The new design saw sublimated diagonal sections, with a futuristic fading, meeting in the middle of the shirt to create what looked like a series of upwards arrows. Whatever your interpretation of this design, it resonated with the Dutch strongly and they elected to use this pattern as their home kit for Euro ’88. The Soviet Union also had this design designated as a home kit but given they seemed to wear a white kit at every possible opportunity at the tournament we can decipher that it wasn’t as popular with the Soviets.

The Netherlands iteration of the design was orange using white as the secondary colour to produce the fading effect between the grey diagonal lines in the geometric pattern. A very modern use of sublimation by adidas’ design team and a pretty wild pattern for one of the big teams at a tournament.

Holland wore this kit in five games at Euro 1988 on West German soil. They managed to beat their great German rivals in this kit at the semi-final stage and lifted the trophy in Munich defeating the Soviet Union in the final. The shirt was mainly paired with white shorts until the final where we saw the orange shorts appear.