Interesting Idea

After consultation with the FAI, Cork City were allowed play in an all black kit in their game away to Sligo Rovers on Saturday night 11th March.
One of Cork's players, unnamed as yet has real problems with colour blindness. The issue mainly arises with teams who predominately play in the most popular colours of red or green kits.
Cork City will continue with this policy to help highlight this issue for the league.

It is estimated about 10% of elite athletes in the world of sport have problems with colour blindness.

This interesting story was highlighted by Talksport presenter Danny Kelly on his Trans Euro Express show on Sunday night, 12th March 2023.

Well done Cork City!

:)

This might sound a bit cynical but, would they not have been better off keeping that quiet? What’s to stop any of the teams that wear red from doing so when they visit Turners Cross now, knowing that they’d be at an (albeit small) advantage given one of the Cork players may have difficulty in distinguishing who is and isn’t a teammate.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nr637

It is estimated about 10% of elite athletes in the world of sport have problems with colour blindness.

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I think you must mean 10% of elite male athletes?

"Colour (color) blindness (colour vision deficiency, or CVD) affects approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women."
https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/

And I recall seeing this being brought up in Englsih football a year or two back with some clubs adjusting their colours, but it doesn't seem to have caught on everywhere. And it doesn't just affect players, but also referees(!), coaches, TV commentators and, of course, spectators. Of this last group, in a crowd of 45k, including 40k males, you might expect over 3k of them to be colour blind.

The Athletic had an interesting article on this a couple of years ago - maybe this was why Matt Holland might have been ambivalent about playing for the Boys in Green? ;)
Five minutes into his Charlton Athletic debut, Matt Holland was struggling. Not because of a lack of fitness, or a lack of understanding with his new team-mates, but because he could barely tell his own side from the opposition.

Charlton, in their red shirts, were away at Plymouth Argyle, whose home kit is green, as part of a pre-season tour in 2003.

Being colour blind, Holland could not distinguish between the two, and only by focusing intently on the different designs of the respective sides’ shorts could he tell the difference.

“Every time I looked up, all I could see was one colour,” Holland tells The Athletic of that day in Plymouth. “I ran over to the dugout. Mervyn Day was assistant manager, with (manager) Alan Curbishley up in the stands. I said, ‘Merv, I have a big problem. I can’t tell the difference between the two teams here’. I was having to look at the shorts, which were different, but that isn’t great if you’re trying to do things quickly.

“He must have thought, ‘What the bloody hell have we signed?’ He told me I’d have to get on with it and that there was nothing they could do. I told them after it was a bit of an issue: I always did things quickly, one and two touches, and kept the ball moving. If I have an extra touch and have to look up that takes away from my game so I had to say I’ve got a problem here.

“We had green, orange, red bibs in training and he had to make sure I had a colour I could see. He was conscious in training that I got a colour I could tell my team-mates apart in, so I knew which team I was on.
More here (no paywall): https://theathletic.com/2947555/2021...s-and-players/


But yes, well done to Cork City, the whole of football should be following their lead.

It's mad that it hasn't been a requirement given how common red/green colour blindness is. One of the lads I used to play with had the same issue, he was having a terrible game one day, never passing the ball and just getting frustrated, had a word with him and he explained very similar to Matt Holland above. We were in green the opposition were in orange and the shorts, sock and jerseys were just solid block colours so he just couldn't tell them apart at all. Meant if he wanted to pass he had to try and pick out faces rather than shirts.

From a different sport, of course, but Peter Ebdon often had to ask the referee for instructions when playing shots where a red and brown were close together, as he found it almost impossible to distinguish between the two. Of course, GAA colours clash on a regular basis, which is when away strips generally get called into action in those sports, but the first time I've heard of it arising in the LoI.

I'm surprised this discussion hasn't come in the LOI sooner considering the prevalence in the male population, at a minimum short colours should be changed when there is a red/green clash

I only found out I had red/green colour blindness during a job medical years back, it's pretty mild got the job anyway. I never really noticed it watching Shels until last season at Tolka when Harps unnecessarily changed to their away kit of all green my eyes found that match hard to follow at times when there was lots of players in close proximity

Cork matches were never as bad at Tolka as their green home strips would usually have some extra white on sleeves or white shorts or striped green/white for a few seasons. Hopefully Shels will wear their away or change the home shorts for tomorrow's game at the cross

Brings back memories of Cork City playing in a black and yellow away kit from mid 90s!Great initative from Cork City.

Im pretty sure this topic was mentioned here a few years back though I cant recall the context.

Pretty sure Shels had a colour blind player around 2004/05. I seem to remember us changing at half time into a yellow kit in one game for this reason.

This is more of an issue in Irish football than some other places (eg GB), where green was sometimes thought to be unlucky. For obvious reasons, many more Irish teams have green colours than in England, say, where Plymouth Argyle are (I think) the only league club whose primary colour is green.

Add to that the fact that red seems to be the most popular football colour and you get regular such colour clashes in Ireland, but not so much in England. Of course green is the traditional colour for goalkeepers, but they're easily distinguishable for other reasons (obv).

Very interesting, just wondering if the present trend for away kits to be any sort of colour, the more outlandish the better outside of the traditional away strips worn by teams in the past that contributes to this?
As someone who is colourblind I was never aware of this but fair play to Cork for highlighting this.

Just to say, there are more types of colourblindness than just red-green, though that's the most common. It seems like there's a good mechanism there already: clubs have change strips for colour clashes already. You just add an extra constraint here.

Heres thee thread this was previously mentioned
https://foot.ie/threads/272176-2022-...lour+blindness