Paolo
Bandini
Duilio Davino shows off Puebla FC's new home shirt. And
a mean grimace.
"After witnessing this effort with
sponsors on their crotch, I got to wondering: what is the biggest
number of sponsors a single football kit has had,"
muses Chris Bates.
It's hard to provide a definitive answer here, Chris, not least
because we're finding it tricky to count exactly how many sponsors
SC Columbia had on their kit for that match against Arsenal. Bear
in mind that some of the patches on the shorts may be repetitions
of brands that already feature on the shirts.
Mjällby AIF's
Firat Topal provided the best effort we could pin down,
though - Swedish side Mjällby AIF's new home
strip, on which we can pick out at
least 13 different sponsors (and that's without seeing the back).
Mark Walsh also pointed us in the direction of Puebla FC's
2009 home
shirt, which boasts a slightly more
modest nine. The shorts have a couple more, too.
Special mention goes to South Melbourne, though, who showed up
for the 2000 World Club Championships with a shirt featuring six
different sponsors. "Sadly that was just over the official
Fifa limit of one," explains Phil Hawkins. "Melbourne had great
difficulty reprinting their shirts in time, and embarrassingly had
to use a rival shirt manufacturer."
Coventry City's strips, on the other hand, have never
advertised multiple sponsors, but they did attempt to base an entire shirt around the car
manufacturer Talbot's logo in the early 1980s. Sadly the
club's then chairman Jimmy Hill failed in his bid to further boost
the club's revenues by changing the team's name to Coventry
Talbot.
