Clubs who changed their colours

A football club’s home colours are their most instantly recognisable aspect, the visual aspect which makes them stand out on the pitch and from which nicknames are often drawn.

But that hasn’t stopped some sides from mixing it up over the years in a sartorial sense…

From government-enforced change to switches enacted by managers (imagine the boss having a say in such matters these days…), we take you through a selection of the outfits who have made like a chameleon at one point or more in their history.

Notts County’s black and white striped shirts carry great significance well beyond England (more on that later), but the oldest professional football club in the world sported a very different look in their infancy.

As Football League founder members in 1888, County took to the pitch in brown and sky blue halved jerseys at home – having previously been decked out in two variations of orange and black.

Chelsea are nicknamed the Blues for good reason – they’ve worn blue home shirts since 1906 – but that wasn’t always their trademark colour.

For the first 12 months of their existence, the West Londoners’ home jerseys were seafoam green – that being the colour used by the club’s owner, Earl Cadogan, in horse racing.

Borussia Dortmund weren’t always the Black and Yellows: they started out playing in blue and white striped shirts – with a red sash (ooh!).

The German giants adopted their current colour scheme in 1913 and have kept it fresh with some snazzy variations over the years – including the neon strip in which they won the 1996/97 Champions League.

Founded in 1919, Leeds United’s very first kit consisted of black and white striped shirts, black shorts and black socks.

After spells in blue and white, yellow and blue, and blue, Leeds made the switch to all white in 1960 – and those have been the Yorkshire outfit’s first-choice threads ever since.

Bayern Munich’s original colours were white and blue – which the multiple European champions wore until 1906, when they merged with the Munich Sport Club and started playing in white and maroon.

Since the late 1960s, however, Bayern have predominantly donned red and white home kits – with the occasional foray into red and blue.

Inter are synonymous with black and blue stripes, a design they’ve donned for the majority of their history – but not all of it…

In 1928, the iconic Italian outfit were forced by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government to merge with another Milan side, Unione Sportiva Milanese, thus becoming Societa Sportiva Ambrosiana (Saint Ambrose is the city’s patron saint).

For the 1928/29 season only, the renamed Inter wore white shirts with a red cross – representing the flag of Milan.

On November 20, 1872, Scotland hosted England at Hamilton Crescent, Glasgow in the first-ever official international football match.

All 11 Scottish players played their club football for Queen’s Park and wore their navy blue and white kit – which was adopted by the national team.

As a result, Queen’s Park switched to their now distinctive black and white hoops – in which they lifted the inaugural Scottish Cup in 1874.

While the base colour of most of their home kits has been white (often adorned with a big black cross), Parma enjoyed their greatest success after switching to yellow and blue hoops in the 90s – a decision made partly as the club had developed an intense rivalry with Juventus, who they defeated in the 1995 UEFA Cup final.

Four years on from that triumph, Parma lifted the UEFA Cup again – this time as I Gialloblu (The Yellow and Blues), a nickname still in use to this day.

Until the mid-20^th century, Mexico predominantly wore maroon shirts – but El Tri are now synonymous with the green shirt, white shorts and red socks combination which reflects the colours of the Mexican flag.

In 2015, however, they opted for something entirely different: a black strip accented with lime green – which looked sharp enough but just wasn’t very ‘Mexico’.

Since then, they’ve regularly switched it up with their first-choice jersey, going back to green, then black again, followed by black and pink – then, in 2024, unveiling a stunning maroon and green patterned design.

Luton have changed kit colours more than 10 times over the course of their history, but the switch from white home shirts to orange is the best-known.

The Hatters did it for the first time in 1973, before reverting to white six years later. They wore orange again during the 1999/2000 campaign, before it returned for good in 2009.

Was that change anything to do with their new sponsorship deal with locally based and famously orange airline easyJet, perhaps…?

In 2012, Cardiff City owner Vincent Tan delivered a perfect lesson in how not to endear yourself to supporters.

Having initially shelved the plans due to fervent backlash, Tan’s consortium changed the Welsh club’s colours from blue to red – and its badge from a bluebird to a dragon. Tan’s reasoning? Red was his lucky colour and, well, he just didn’t like the bluebird…

The deeply unpopular rebrand didn’t last long, and Cardiff returned to blue home shirts and their previous crest in 2015 (although the bluebird was now accompanied by a little red dragon).

Stockport County’s traditional colours are royal blue and white – but they have deviated from them at times during their long history.

The most notable change of all came in 1979, when player-manager Mike Summerbee – who had a deal with Adidas – procured a spare batch of Argentina shirts from the iconic German manufacturer – Argentina having just won the 1978 World Cup.

Controversial a move though it was, Stockport fans largely welcomed the new strip – only for it to be pulled in April 1982 amid the outbreak of the Falklands War.

In the beginning, Everton played at Anfield – and Liverpool played in blue (and white halves…).

The most successful club on Merseyside have played in red since the fifth year of their existence, though, and have truly been the Reds since the mid-1960s – when they donned their now iconic all-red kit for the first time in a European Cup clash with Anderlecht.

According to striker Ian St John, legendary Reds boss Bill Shankly thought the colour scheme would instil fear in the opposition.

Colour clashes aside, it’s hard to imagine Brazil, the most successful team in international football, playing in anything other than yellow shirts with a green trim.

But that classic combination only became their go-to ahead of the 1954 World Cup, after 19-year-old Aldyr Garcia Schlee won a competition to design a new kit for the Selecao.

The competition was launched in response to Brazil’s humiliating defeat to Uruguay in the decisive game of the 1950 World Cup on home soil, with their white and blue jerseys at the time criticised for lacking patriotism.

Italy’s most decorated club, Juventus have become well and truly synonymous with black and white stripes – with the Turin giants’ earliest such shirts supplied to them by… Notts County.

Frustrated that repeated washing caused their early pink jerseys to lose their colour, Juve sought an alternative. They asked one of their players, Englishman John Savage, if he knew anyone back home who could kit them out; he turned to his County-supporting mate, and the rest is history.

Manchester United were formed in 1878 as Newton Heath – who chopped and changed between various colour schemes.

By far the most famous, though, is green and gold (ok, it’s pretty much yellow), and the halved shirts were replicated by United for one of their away strips during the early years of the Premier League.

Such colours also became symbolic of the anti-Glazer protest movement, with fans regularly showing their dissatisfaction with the club’s owners by wearing scarves which wouldn’t look out of place at a Norwich City match…

United donned their distinctive combination of red shirts, white shorts and black socks for the first time in 1902.