Where Football Kit Colours Come From and Why They Stick

Ask supporters why their club plays in a certain shade and most will give you a story that sounds certain and turns out to be half folklore. Football kit colours are one of the oldest parts of a club's identity, older than most badges and many grounds, yet the real reasons behind them are often stranger, more practical, and more accidental than the version printed in the matchday programme.

This piece looks at where those colours actually came from, why so many were borrowed rather than chosen, and why clubs that tinker with them get punished harder than clubs that change almost anything else.

Most football kit colours were borrowed, not designed

In the 1870s and 1880s, nobody commissioned a colour palette. A group of factory workers, church members, or schoolboys needed shirts, and they used whatever they could get. That often meant a donation from a better established club.

Arsenal are the classic case. When the club was formed at the Woolwich munitions works in 1886, two former Nottingham Forest players helped secure a set of red shirts from Forest. The redcurrant shade Arsenal wore for years after was simply what arrived in the box. Juventus have a similar origin. The club originally played in pink, and around 1903 an English member arranged for replacement shirts from Nottingham. The shirts that came back were black and white stripes in the style of Notts County, and Juventus kept them.

Spain has its own version. The red and white stripes of Athletic Club, and later Atletico Madrid, are linked to a batch of shirts bought in England around 1909, usually traced to Southampton's kit. Atletico's nickname, Los Colchoneros, comes from the resemblance of those stripes to old mattress covers, which tells you how glamorous the original decision felt at the time. For more on how those labels stick, see our piece on where football club nicknames actually come from.

When the colour came from somewhere else entirely

Not every club borrowed from another team. Some took colours from local life, politics, or pure chance.

Boca Juniors: the blue and gold is widely said to come from the flag of a Swedish ship that docked in the port of La Boca in the early 1900s, after the founders agreed to adopt the colours of the next ship to arrive.
The Netherlands: orange refers to the House of Orange-Nassau, the Dutch royal family, even though orange appears nowhere on the national flag.
Italy: the azure blue comes from the House of Savoy, the ruling dynasty when the national team first wore blue in 1911, which is why Italy wears blue rather than any colour from its tricolour.
Celtic: green and white connect directly to the Irish community in Glasgow's East End that founded the club in 1887.

These origins matter because they tie the shirt to a place or a people. A club can redesign a badge every decade and survive it. Change a colour with that kind of root and the reaction is closer to grief.

Deliberate changes that actually worked

It is easy to assume colours never change. They do, and a few deliberate changes became the identity people now treat as ancient.

Leeds United played in blue and gold until 1961, when Don Revie switched the club to all white. The reasoning, as often told, was that he wanted his side to carry the aura of Real Madrid, who had just won five consecutive European Cups. Within a decade the white kit was so tied to Revie's successful team that few fans under fifty could picture Leeds in anything else.

Coventry City adopted sky blue in 1962 under manager Jimmy Hill, who rebranded the club around the colour with a new nickname, a club song, and matching marketing. That is one of the earliest examples of a football club treating colour as brand strategy rather than inheritance, and it worked because it came with on-pitch success and a clear story.

The pattern in both cases is the same. The change came with a reason supporters could repeat, and the results followed quickly enough to attach good memories to the new shirt.

The advice clubs keep getting wrong about tradition

The common line from commercial departments is that a kit should "honour heritage while looking fresh every season". In practice that means a third shirt in teal, a home shirt with a gradient, and a press release about a fictional archive reference.

The counter-take is simple. Heritage is not honoured by referencing it. It is honoured by leaving the core colour alone. Supporters do not object to a new collar or a different sponsor placement. They object when the main shade drifts, because the colour is the one element a fan of 1960 and a fan of 2026 recognise in exactly the same way.

Cardiff City are the cautionary example. In 2012 the owner changed the home kit from blue to red, mainly for commercial reasons in Asian markets. Protests ran for more than two seasons, attendances suffered, and the club returned to blue in January 2015. The kit cost the club far more in goodwill than it ever earned in shirt sales.

Hull City's 2013 attempt to rebrand as Hull Tigers, which also touched colours and identity, met the same wall of resistance and was eventually rejected by the Football Association. The lesson repeats every time: identity changes imposed from above fail far more often than changes that grow from success on the pitch. Our longer look at why a club's badge redesign almost always sparks backlash follows the same pattern from the crest side.

How to trace your own club's colours

If you want to find the real origin of your club's colours rather than the version on the website, the process is slower than a search engine but far more reliable:

Find the earliest newspaper match reports, usually through a local library's microfilm or a digitised newspaper archive. Reporters in the 1880s and 1890s often described teams by shirt colour rather than name.
Check the club's founding minutes or early annual reports if the club or a supporters' group holds them. Kit purchases sometimes appear as line items, with a supplier and a price.
Look at team photographs and date them by player names, not by captions. Captions on old prints are frequently wrong by a year or two.
Treat any single dramatic story with suspicion until it appears in two independent sources written within twenty years of the event.

Our step by step guide to researching your football club's history from scratch covers archives, local historians, and how to record what you find.

Frequently asked questions

Why do so many football clubs wear red?

Red dye was relatively cheap and widely available in the late nineteenth century, and many early clubs received donated red shirts from established teams. Arsenal's success also made red shirts fashionable among clubs that were formed later. Practical availability did more than symbolism in most cases.

Can a football club legally change its kit colours?

Generally yes, because colours are a club decision rather than a league rule, though leagues require a home and change kit that do not clash. Some clubs now have supporter consultation written into their governance, and in England fan-led reforms have pushed for heritage items like colours to require supporter approval.

What is the oldest kit colour still used in football?

Several clubs claim continuous use from the 1860s and 1870s, with Notts County's black and white stripes among the strongest cases, since the same pattern travelled to Turin and became Juventus' look. Exact claims are hard to verify because early records rarely described shirts consistently, so treat any "oldest" title as a strong candidate rather than proof.