Changing your kit every season is something that has evolved over the last twenty years. Before that, clubs might alternate between a change to the home kit and an away kits. In the 1960s it didn’t change at all beyond the odd change of neckline or cuff design. Nowadays not only is it a routine part of the summer, a whole art form has evolved around it, the kit launch. Jonny Biscuits looks at the evolution of kit launches over the last decade.

Back in the far reaches of distant footballing history (12 years ago), when shirts were still known as jerseys, socks were still stockings, and away kits were called change strips, somebody at Oxford United had a bold idea to launch the new home and away kits. Sorry, strips. 

The idea was a simple one – bring club and city together, embrace the rich heritage of our home and hold a launch event at the historic Oxford Castle and Prison that had recently been converted into four-star luxury hotel.

The notion conjures up visions of club dignitaries and elite players hobnobbing with sponsors and selected members of the press over canapes and glasses of champagne, with a professional photo shoot using the historic locale as an iconic and artistic backdrop to bring the new kits to life.

Needless to say, it wouldn’t be very Oxford United if that’s how it actually panned out – instead what it gave rise to was what is possibly the greatest ever launch photo in the history of football. 

A penny for the thoughts of Johnny Mullins and Josh Ruffels. 

It would potentially dampen the majesty of the image to over analyse it, but a quick tip for budding photographers attending kit launches everywhere – when you’re at a famous landmark that has been specially chosen for the occasion, don’t stand with your back to it when taking your pics. And at least wait for the hatchback to get out of the background first. 

But we’re being unfair – the club was still relatively fresh out of the Conference at that point and even across football, the art of overhyping a t-shirt reveal was still in its early stages. On that damp and underwhelming day in 2014, our club took its first, drizzly step towards the idea of making an event out of the annual ritual of finding different ways of showing fans what the new kit looks like.

Don’t look back 

Just a year later, in 2015/16, everything on and off the pitch clicked satisfyingly into place and the kit launch was no exception. Conceived and created by Oxford supporters, Kath and Liam Faulkner (yes, that Kath Faulkner, OUWFC fans) the club’s first official ‘retro’ kit was launched with a fun and colourful set of graphics with OUFC players as a set of “1986 Cup-winners” Subbuteo figures . 

The campaign set a standard of creativity and quality that would be difficult to match

The following year, the club decided to stop mucking around and issued a message that basically said: some players will be wearing the new shirt at the club shop on Monday morning – come and buy it.  A week later Alex MacDonald, Joe Skarz and John Lundstram were carted off to London Zoo’s lion enclosure for a photoshoot for the away kit – the club’s shirt sponsor at the time being asset management firm Liontrust, even though they’re about investment portfolios, not lions. 

Meanwhile a troubling new trend had been proliferating around England – ever searching for an angle to make more sales, Premier League teams had been launching their new kits before the previous season had even finished – with the team wearing it for the final home game of the season. Disappointingly, we latched onto this dismal idea in 2017 – while kit launches can sometimes be a bit exhausting, it is at least something to look forward to over the summer and thankfully we’ve never done this since. 

Things cooked up a notch in 2019 with a dramatic promo video showing Josh Ruffels contemplating shirts from promotion seasons past – a caption at the end optimistically promising that this season would be no different. To be fair, we did make it to the play-off final that season, albeit with the support of the points per game shenanigans after the season was curtailed due to covid. 

The following year, in the midst of the pandemic where emotive content was rife, Nick Harris voiced a stirring video about the club’s past and its future to reveal an away kit modelled on the old gold colour of the early Headington United kits and the special 125th anniversary shirt from two seasons earlier. 

Why so serious?

2022/23 the club tried a new angle – the kit reveal was held back until the players took to the field wearing it for a pre-season match against Coventry City with the promise that the first people who’d see it would be those inside the ground as the players walked out onto the pitch. Presumably this was an incentive to get people to buy tickets but that was somewhat diminished by the announcement that the kit would also be launched on social media a few minutes later at the kick off time of 3pm.

That social media launch included a jazzy video of a photoshoot with four genuine Oxford United supporters modelling the kit. A nice touch, although unless you knew they were supporters, you might not have guessed. Presumably during the planning stages of that campaign, somebody’s day at work would have involved scouring the various Oxford United social media hashtags to scrutinise and judge the physical appearance of our fanbase to find supporters who were young and good-looking enough to be involved. What a time to be alive. 

As somebody who would definitely have been chalked off as being too old and ugly it’d be easy to take umbrage at that, but the club were just following the rules of marketing, not setting them. Perhaps though, one day a creative mind will see the value in a kit-launch campaign involving robustly proportioned middle age supporters wearing replica shirts that are a size too small, swilling down pints of weak lager in the garden at The Blackbird, or sat on their sofa enjoying a doner kebab for Sunday lunch with chilli sauce all down their front. 

Something like that is inevitable at some point.  Marketing trends are cyclical – it probably applies to all football clubs at the moment, but Oxford United is currently neck-deep in its po-faced, serious phase in terms of the tone and content of its kit launches. At some point, the ideas will dry up for what you can do with footballers and/or models with stern faces with their arms folded or pointing at the camera in artistically lit rooms that mean you can’t actually see the kit that’s being promoted. 

And perhaps then we’ll enter a new phase of self-aware, self-deprecating and offbeat kit launches that pokes affectionate fun at the fact that most football supporters aren’t athletic and attractive people. Or maybe we’ll just get something light-hearted and whimsical, which would certainly make a nice change from photos and videos of grumpy looking people.

Intransigence

But for the time-being, while our Championship status gives our shirt sales a boost, its difficult to see the marketing approach change even it’s debatable how much impact the marketing strategy really has. 

The last time we’ve had something that could be described as a fun launch was 2023/24’s third kit – a small selection of supporters were awarded golden tickets to a city centre rooftop bar for a kit launch party on a weekday afternoon where a DJ was spinning hot tunes and a live local band closed proceedings. Special bucket hats in the kit’s vibrant turquoise blue colour scheme were freely distributed with shirts on sale to attendees – a smart bit of work engineering the sprawling network of supporters’ social media to spread pictures of the new kit leading to a mix of FOMO from those who weren’t there and gloating from those who were… but lots of promotion nonetheless.

While it was creative and clever, the tone and language accompanying the campaign was portraying an image of being serious and ultra-cool. The home kit that year was launched with a migraine inducing yoof culture video soundtracked by what my kids pejoratively refer to ‘roadman’ music, accompanied by a snappy slogan of “Smart. Casual. Oxford 🔥” (these days barely a day goes by without the club posting something on social media with three words with a full-stop between each one). Inexplicably the campaign had a second slogan “Be Your Own Hero” whatever that means.  There were similar vibes for the away kit launch video where young players were filmed at the New Theatre featuring even more unbearable music along with a catchphrase of “It’s Showtime.”

 So far this season, we’ve had a home kit launch campaign that seems to have been dreamt up by somebody who’s only read about Oxford on Wikipedia. The slogan this time was modern. classic. and if ‘Hipsters wearing beige slacks, playing chess, and boating in the grounds of Blenheim Palace’ doesn’t scream Oxford United fans to you, I don’t know what does..  

Interestingly, I make that the third or fourth a kit has launched with a theme of embracing our past while looking to our future, and as if to highlight just how difficult it is to come up with new ideas, the black away kit was teased with almost a carbon copy of the teaser from the black away kit from 2017.

Both were accompanied by good-looking models or footballers with very, very serious expressions on their faces. The production values of these campaigns are clearly very high, but they paint a picture of a football club that takes itself very seriously. It all seems a hundred miles away from the fun, colour and enjoyment of the Subbuteo kit launch of a decade again. 

Another noteworthy element of the most recent kit launches is the nonsensical, LinkedIn-glish corporate speak that accompanies them. An analysis of the club’s excruciating over-use of ChatGPT or similar generative AI text is one for a different time, but it’s worth a quick look at the opening paragraphs of the word soup press release that launched the away kit. The article, inexplicably, appears to be promoting the promotional campaign that launched the kit, rather than the kit itself.

…a bold, modern design that blends confidence, identity, and style, launched as part of the Club’s editorial-inspired campaign, On the Road. Captured in striking monochrome tones and defined by bold lighting, sharp lines, and strong silhouettes, the visuals lean into fashion-forward, high-end aesthetics which mirror the kit’s contemporary design and premium details. 

It didn’t end there – a few hours after the kit was launched, an excitable press release twice claimed in its opening three sentences that strong early sales of the shirt were due to the promotional campaign. Apparently it was nothing to do with the fact that we have a lot more fans now we’re in the Championship or that maybe it’s just that lots of people liked the design. 

The impressive sales figures were also breathlessly acclaimed as “a new benchmark in Club history.” With all due respect to the commercial arm of the club and their t-shirt sales, that’s probably a bit of a stretch and I doubt it’s a statistic that would be trouble the club’s historian. If they still have a job, that is.

The commercial end of the club clearly now calls the shots on how it communicates. A thousand times more effort went into selling t-shirts than went into helping panicking supporters worried that their new season tickets hadn’t arrived less than a week before the season began. Clearly we need to boost any funding stream we can as we’ll always be up against clubs with much, much deeper pockets than we do – but there’s a way of doing that without being crass about it, and still serving the supporters. I’m not sure we’ve got that balance right just now. 

Anyway, at the time of writing, we still have a third kit launch to come – maybe this one will be something a bit different…

The Oxblogger Newsletter

This article was first published in the Oxblogger Newsletter, a bi-monthly Oxford United fanzine by the fans for the fans. See the whole issue here and subscribe to get each issue straight to your in-box each.