*WARNING: The following story may contain football kit images some viewers may find upsetting*
There are crap kits, there are crimes against football and fashion, and then there are shirts we wish could be unseen as soon as our eyes focus on them.
Then, below even those depths, are the truly distressing, horrific shirts that deserve to be burned and then have their ashes collected and thrown to the bottom of the ocean in a locked chest.
This Mexico 3rd shirt by the infamous ABA Sport falls into that last category.
Going against every piece of advice their mothers ever gave them that, “red and green should never be seen unless there’s a colour in between,” Mexican manufacturers ABA Sport weaved some tribal trickery into the fabric of this alternative variation to the mind-boggling but weirdly attractive El Tri shirt worn at the 1998 World Cup in France.
Mexico’s shirts are often a little bit weird as our run-down of their World Cup kits will tell you, but as if the Aztec calendar inspired shirts from France 1998 were not enough, this alternative shirt brought red into the equation to really sear the design onto our retinas.
Thankfully, it was only ever worn once.
Thankfully, few images remain of Mexico’s 3-1 win friendly victory over Ecuador in 1997.
As Ecuador were wearing yellow and there was no clash with Mexico’s green, it begs the question why the kit was ever needed?
In the same way some people get all misty-eyed about concrete carbuncle car-parks that should have been pulled down years ago, nostalgia for the 1990s has seen some crimes against fashion forgiven as supporters look to the uniformity of modern kit templates and yearn for something different.
Shirts like this are almost certainly a thing of the past due to FIFA’s regulations around kit designs which does make us a little bit sad that we may never see absolute attacks on the senses like this again.
Whatever your view on whether this is a classic example of 1990s Sartorial Soccer elegance or a shirt so bad it deserves to be destroyed with fire; ABA certainly were not friendly to the colour blind.
What do you think? Were ABA onto something or on something?
Please let us know in the comments below!
Sartorial Soccer 