CORINTHIANS X SENNA 2018-19

Kit connoisseur Phil Delves looks back at an ultimate 'collab shirt' from South America - one that heralded a black and gold craze

- Phil Delves

For many, football shirt sponsors are a necessary evil. An otherwise immaculate garment may find itself tainted by the presence of a corporate logo, even if said crest has been faithfully colour-matched to the kit's aesthetic (a clashing badge doesn't bear thinking about).

Though this reputation is in many ways wellfounded, I'm on a mission to unearth football shirts both old and new where the sponsor is actually the star of the show rather than an unfortunate byproduct.

From the dramatically-oversized sponsors of the late 1970s to the contemporary kits whose designs are shaped around the branding of their benefactors, the football shirt world may look cleaner without sponsors but, in my mind, it wouldn't be better.

In 2018, the shirt stratosphere was turned upside down with the release of Nigeria’s kits ahead of the World Cup. The ‘Naija’ collection represented a cultural zeitgeist, exceeding the boundaries of a typical shirt release and crossing into the wider consciousness. For all the (justified, in my opinion) praise the strip and its supporting garb received, though, there was another kit unveiled in 2018 that we can now look back on as a design which, while much less talked about, ushered in the modern football shirt landscape we now find ourselves in.