The Good, The Bad, The WTF

I hate it when this happens. You get so busy with other things that you forget what day of the week it is. That happened to me yesterday, which is why a Wednesday came and went without a weekly installment of this recurring feature. My apologies to anyone who noticed and cared. Of course, if you did not notice or care, then my apologies for wasting your time with this paragraph.

Torquay United are coming back to the Football League after a two-year absence. The Gulls finished bottom of the table in 2007, 13 points adrift of safety in League Two. They nearly bounced right back up in 2008, finishing third in the conference, but were beaten out in the playoffs by Exeter City. Last season it was Torquay's turn to go up through the playoffs, a feat accomplished after a 2-0 win over Canbridge United.

Before their woeful 2006-07 season, Torquay had been in the Football League for 80 consecutive seasons, despite never advancing higher that the third tier. That's pretty impressive. Of course, if it were up to me, I'd have kicked them out of the league in 1992-93 for wearing such an ugly shirt, and a cheap ripoff at that.


Here's what I don't understand. It's obvious that this shirt is trying to use the same Umbro template that showed up in Northern Ireland, among others, at the time. Unfortunately, Torquay must not have been able to afford paying Unbro prices, so they got a knockoff from a company that advertises team kits in the back of football magazines. This shirt is so cheap, there is not even a manufacturer's logo on it. It's almost like No Logo got published a decade earlier, if you disregard the shirt sponsor and team badge. Oh wait, the manufacturer logo is on the sleeves. Yeah, so, not so much then.


As you can barely see in this closer view, there is some kind of pattern-within-a-pattern thing going on. Doesn't make it any better.

The real crime, as far as I am concerned, is how this shirt minimizes the team badge. If you did not know better, you'd feel safe in an assumption that the badge is the manufacturer logo, probably some company that starts with an M. Coincidentally, Matchwinner made this shirt. Perhaps that was planned on their part?

As an aside, the movement ascribed to No Logo never really took off did it? Besides Radiohead, did anyone take this manifesto seriously? Corporations have their logos in more spaces than ever before. Perhaps it's time for a fresh sequel from a less earnest, more thoughtful author who self-publishes instead of using a publisher who put their logo on the front cover. Just a thought.

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