My top ten (as detailed on my blog some time ago.)
10: Eintracht Frankfurt away shirt, 1993. Because gold, red, white and blue are such complementary colours, even before you splash arbitrary squiggles on the ****ing thing.
9: Valencia away shirt, 1985. All the sins of the eighties in one convenient bundle. Horrible coarse, stretchy fabric, sleeves a trained worm would have trouble negotiating and just to top it off, that inexplicable blue shawl.
8: ESV Greifswald, circa 2000. I refuse to believe this was the result of anything other than a print roller slipping its moorings and being too expensive to replace. No other explanation makes sense.
7: Shimizu S-Pulse, 1995. If you run this pattern through a waveform amplifier, it plays The Blue Danube. Probably.
6: Mexican national team, late 90s. Those crazy psychedelic Mexicans. Yes, that is supposed to be Montezuma leering out from beneath the red dye.
5: LKS Lodz, 1999. "Okay guys, we need a special commemorative shirt to mark our first championship since 1948, ideas?" "How about a sort of vertical stripe interchanging with chequerboard motif, with a white gap in the middle so it looks like the sponsor's logo is bursting from the wearer's ribcage á la Alien?" "I love it!"
4: Atletico Madrid away shirt, 2004. Nothing gets my goat like superhero films,crass commercialism, and ugly football shirts, so combine the three and you have an entire herd of palsied and frothing goats. This abomination was designed to advertise the then newly-released Spiderman 2. After one game, UEFA quite rightly told Atletico and Columbia Pictures to go **** themselves with a hedgehog.
3: VFL Bochum, 1995. At least only one quarter of the shirt was rainbow-coloured. We wouldn't want to be silly, would we?
2: Colorado Caribous, mid-70s. It's beige. It's got a cowboy fringe. What more needs to be said?
1: Spora Luxembourg, early 90s. How about this for an overdose of what-the-shuddering-****? The broad interrupted stripes make my head spin. The lurid primary colours set my eyelid twitching. The less said about the white wedge thing, the better. But what really drives me over the edge is the beehive/cobweb/old lady's pashmina pattern on the sleeves. Christ on stilts, we have a winner!
