A lot has been spoken over the years about footballers and their lack of taste. Stories of training ground fashion faux pas and the grisly pictures of Stephen Ireland’s house in ‘VIP’ magazine doing nothing to dispel the myth that style on the pitch doesn’t always equate to style off it.
It is perhaps that jealousy and snobbishness against young working class men, flaunting vast amounts of wealth, motivates the snorts of derision from various quarters.
Either way, the pitch represents a safer domain for players to put a stamp of individuality on their appearance with the fads and fashions that come and go over the years.
What interests me is the tendency for players to tweak their match-day garb a certain way for a time, only for it to sink without trace (or mention) come the following season. Some of them stick around for longer than others and most manage to permeate right down the leagues and are even displayed on Sunday-league pitches by the more daring.
Remember when players up and down the country would turn up their collar à la Cantona? Or how seemingly half of the football world decided to follow Thierry Henry’s lead and roll their socks all the way up and over their knees, only for both of these habits to dwindle and die after a season or two?
Perhaps it’s a mass delusion that emulating the look of such iconic footballing enigmas somehow helps us achieve their levels of flair and brilliance. Or maybe we just want to look cool.
Not all these trends are sparked by a specific player; witness the craze for cycling shorts of the mid-to-late nineties. Everyone was at it, acting out a savvy re-branding in ‘base layer/active wear’ or something.
Some players still persist with it today but, in the main, lycra shorts have been replaced by long sleeved vests. Maybe sport science has discovered that arm muscles need to be kept warm in order to achieve optimum performance.
For a while it looked as though ‘snoods’ would be the go-to garment again this winter. But they didn’t really take off as they did last year, when popularity was so high they were even getting mentions on Match of The Day.
Back at the start of the century, black woollen gloves bearing the eponymous white ‘swoosh’ were standard issue for the ‘Invincibles’ of Arsenal. The whole squad seemed to own a pair! Players today seem more willing to brave the worst of our island nation’s weather, snood-less and numb-fingered.
Unlike the tight shorts and tighter curls of the seventies, the mullets and moustaches of the eighties, the ridiculous lace up, open necked shirts of the nineties or even the tattoos so prevalent today, these quirks of fad and fashion exist apart from whatever’s going on in the real world.
Rather, they mark an attempt by players to distinguish themselves within the limited confines of their ubiquitous uniforms. Nor is it in any great part to do with namby-pamby modern footballers so different from the hardmen of yore; back in 1979, Leicester’s Keith Weller turned out in a pair of what can only be described as tights in a match against Norwich City (a game in which he incidentally scored) and ‘70s footballers could hardly be labelled prima donnas.
So there we have it, though they may be transient in and of themselves, football fashion fads aren’t going anywhere. It’s only a matter of time before the next craze pops up. Maybe we’ll see a wave of players sporting knee and elbow pads or perhaps bobble hats and scarves. All we can do is follow along and not judge too harshly when the centre-back for the ‘Shoulder of Mutton’ pitches up in a pair of Edgar Davids-style specs. If it works for our sporting heroes, then why not?