The 1980s

Clubs began to exploit the potential revenue from selling shirt sponsorship.  The BBC and ITV companies refused to broadcast matches featuring branded shirts, forcing clubs to remove sponsors’ logos when the cameras were present.  In 1983 the TV companies finally gave way and allowed sponsored shirts to be broadcast: immediately the value of a sponsorship deal with a club that would feature regularly on Match of the Day or the equivalent ITV programme went through the roof.  At the time, Football League regulations restricted the size of logos to a maximum of 81square centimetres, but for televised games they had to be half this size.

A third colour was introduced to the strips of most clubs: Liverpool, for example, who had introduced yellow to their kit in 1976, featured pale grey trim in the mid-1980s and later dark green.

In the 1982 FA Cup Final Tottenham Hotspur unveiled the first shadow stripe design and suddenly everyone was sporting shadow stripes, pin stripes or both as technology allowed for ever more intricate designs.

Towards the end of the decade shirts became more generously cut as new lightweight fabrics became available. Improvements in production allowed for intricate designs to be woven or printed into the fabric itself, permitting manufacturers to counteract the burgeoning market in cheap counterfeit kits that began to appear.