For a few weeks towards the back end of last season, a small sliver of what we’ll call the ‘football nerd’ community got a bit excited.

It was after Inter Milan made the Champions League final. At the time, the Italian giants were playing their games sporting a reasonably rare thing: a sponsorless shirt.

Advertisement

The reason was a very 2023 explanation for a 1973 aesthetic. For much of the season, their sponsor was Digitalbits, a cryptocurrency business who — and make sure you’re sitting down for this one — came up short when they were due to hand over actual currency, missing a €24million (£20.6m; $26.3m) payment due to the club. Inter eventually lost patience and removed the company’s logo from their jerseys and the magnificent possibility of a team playing a Champions League final with no corporate branding was dangled in front of us.

Elsewhere on The Athletic…

Sadly, they eventually signed a deal with Paramount+ so had that logo slapped awkwardly across their bellies. But the dream was awakened again yesterday, when Chelsea revealed their new home kit… without a sponsor, after not managing to agree a deal for what we must now call a ‘front-of-shirt partner’ in time for the launch. And it will, almost certainly, be a temporary arrangement.

But even the prospect of Chelsea running out in their first Premier League game against Liverpool on August 13 is a rare pleasure. The sponsorless shirt can be a gorgeous sight, something that appeals to those of us with a wistful and nostalgic bent. There’s something about the cleanness of the design, an expression of simplicity in a very complex world.

Introducing our 23/24 @NikeFootball home shirt! ⭐

90's inspired and shimmering in gold, celebrating 25 years since our iconic 97/98 season where we took home the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup. #ItsA90sThing #ThePrideOfLondon

— Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) July 10, 2023

We could over-intellectualise this by saying it’s a symbol of a simpler time when football hadn’t been commodified to quite the extent it currently has; when being a fan didn’t feel quite so transactional.

But let’s not pretend it’s that ideological, or even that this is an old duffer recalling the days of his youth when men were men and players downed their pints, stubbed out their cigarettes and wiped their hands on their heavy, sponsorless shirts before trotting out onto the pitch. I went to my first game in 1989 when shirt sponsors had been commonplace for the better part of a decade in England, so I can’t remember contemporaneously watching games without them.

Advertisement

It’s much more basic than that. It’s just that sponsorless shirts look cool.

They’re clean. They’re crisp. There’s beauty in their simplicity. Large numbers of sponsors’ logos are just ugly and while that problem could be solved by superior graphic design, it is also the case that a shirt without any sort of commercial logo across the belly is a wonderful sight.

There are caveats to this. Nottingham Forest spent the first half of last season without a sponsor, but the sparse design of their home shirt just made it look a bit boring. As it turns out, there’s a fine line between ‘clean’ and ‘cool’ and ‘looking like a generic, bulk-bought from the back pages of FourFourTwo shirt for a Sunday league team’.

And it should also be said that sometimes, a good sponsor’s logo can add to a shirt’s appeal — the Newcastle Brown Ale roundel that graced Newcastle’s shirts in the 1990s, for example. Or ABN-Amro’s unorthodox vertical configuration on old Ajax shirts. Or Inter’s former long-time benefactor Pirelli. All of those became part of multiple iconic shirts over the years.

Sometimes though, a sponsorless shirt simply cannot be beaten. The classic example is Barcelona, who for years rather piously told the world that their jerseys were simply too pure to be sullied by the cold hand of capitalism. Until, that is, Qatar then Rakuten then Spotify and their gigantic bags of cash arrived. Still, despite the belief they were morally above the rest of us being powerfully obnoxious, it did make for a succession of beautiful shirts. For what it’s worth, the 1996/97 version, made by Kappa and modelled by Ronaldo, Luis Figo and an upright holding midfielder named Pep Guardiola, is a personal favourite.

More recently, Boca Juniors, due to a strange period after one sponsorship deal lapsed and another kicked in, sported an unsullied shirt, making their fantastically cool blue-with-gold-band design ice cold.

Advertisement

Lazio have been sponsorless in a number of seasons recently, which meant they frequently fell foul of the ‘hmmm, a bit boring’ trap with their kit design. An exception was their 2015-16 away kit when an eagle was splashed across their chests instead of a corporate logo, a mirror of their club badge. It did look pretty cool, even if a) it did resemble the livery of a 1970s airline and b) it was a little uncomfortable given the political leanings of their spicier ultras and the role of eagles in fascist iconography.

Porto sort of went sponsorless in 2015-16 — or at least the front of their shirts did, with Portuguese lager brand Super Bock instead displayed on the back.

Roma were sponsorless for a few seasons from 2014-2018, with a few of those designs sailing very close to the ‘plain and boring’ wind. This summer, the club have returned to Adidas for the first time in 30 years and — as another former Digitalbits partner — are currently sponsorless.

Tutti i dettagli della nostra nuova maglia 😍

📄 #ASRoma

— AS Roma (@OfficialASRoma) July 6, 2023

Lifestyle brand and occasional football club Venezia have been sponsorless for a couple of seasons, but ruin the aesthetic slightly by slapping the name of their club on the front of the shirts, as if they’re concerned people are going to forget who they are.

There have also been occasional quirks in European competition, where for assorted reasons clubs have been unable to sport their sponsors’ logos on the continent. Arsenal in the mid-1990s, for example, and West Ham’s greatest moment in their recent history, the Europa Conference League win last season, was achieved with a sponsorless shirt.

The Hammers were also among a handful of Premier League teams who have gone a season without a sponsor, doing so in 1997-98, and they also had to improvise in 2008-09 when their then-sponsor XL, a package holiday company, went out of business in September. The XL logo was replaced by large white squares with the players’ squad numbers plastered on the chests of their shirts — the equivalent of putting a large and elaborate brooch over a ketchup stain and hoping nobody would notice.

There is some good news for those of us who enjoy a sponsorless shirt: this coming season, Adidas will give people the option to purchase replica jerseys with or without the sponsor’s logo. It’s an interesting development, although you wonder how happy about this the suits at some big companies who have paid some big money to some big football clubs will be.

Advertisement

Chelsea fans might not even get that pleasure. The new shirt won’t be available to buy until after the season starts and the club have warned that they might have sorted out a primary shirt sponsor by then.

But for the moment, the sponsorless shirts are there, modelled by the Chelsea players, and it’s possible to imagine a world where they play like that for the whole season.

(Top photo: Chelsea FC)