Kit (association football) facts for kids
In association football, kit (also referred to as a strip or uniform) is the standard equipment and attire worn by players. The sport's Laws of the Game specify the minimum kit which a player must use, and also prohibit the use of anything that is dangerous to either the player or another participant. Individual competitions may have further restrictions, such as regulating the size of logos displayed on shirts and stating that, in the event of a match between teams with identical or similar colours, the away team must change to different coloured attire.
Footballers generally wear identifying numbers on the backs of their shirts. Originally a team of players wore numbers from 1 to 11, corresponding roughly to their playing positions, but at the professional level this has generally been superseded by squad numbering, whereby each player in a squad is allocated a fixed number for the duration of a season. Professional clubs also usually display players' surnames or nicknames on their shirts, above or below their squad numbers.
Football kit has evolved significantly since the early days of the sport when players typically wore thick cotton shirts, knickerbockers and heavy rigid leather boots. In the twentieth century, boots became lighter and softer, shorts were worn at a shorter length, and advances in clothing manufacture and printing allowed shirts to be made in lighter synthetic fibres with increasingly colourful and complex designs. With the rise of advertising in the 20th century, sponsors' logos began to appear on shirts, and replica strips were made available for fans to purchase, generating significant amounts of revenue for clubs.
Images for kids
-
Pavel Nedvěd pictured in 2006 wearing a typical modern football kit
-
Shin pads are compulsory.
-
The home shirt of Olympique de Marseille for the 2006–07 season
-
Modern turf shoes, which are designed to be used on hard artificial turf or sand
-
Various styles of goalkeeping gloves
-
Referee Howard Webb wearing a black strip
-
The New Brompton team of 1894 sporting typical kit of the era, including heavy jersey, long shorts, heavy high-topped boots and shin pads worn outside the stockings. Goalkeepers wore the same shirts as their team-mates at this point in time.
-
By the early 20th century, shorts had become shorter and goalkeepers wore shirts of a different colour, as seen in this photograph of Internazionale in 1910
-
The national team of Argentina in typical kit of the early 1960s
-
Sponsored shirts, such as these worn in various seasons by Paris St Germain, became the norm in the modern era.
-
Manchester United replica away strips on display
See also
In Spanish: Equipamiento de los futbolistas para niños
