The Good, The Bad, The WTF

I came across this link yesterday, and I must say that I like the new Bradford City shirts. Kind of like a low rent Roma, which may have influenced the signing of Benito Carbone upon their entry into the Premier League in 2000. That signing was a financial disaster, but without getting into grisly specifics, is not the worst disaster Bradford City has faced.

In 1985 Bradford City won their league for the first time in almost 60 years. On the day they were to lift the trophy in front of their home fans, a fire started underneath the dilapidated, and wooden, home stand. Many of the approximately 3000 fans who were in the stand made it to safety, but 56 did not. The main stand was fully consumed by flames within four minutes. This year's Bradford City shirt pays tribute to those lost with an embroidered black ribbon on the back.

A couple of years after the fire, Bradford City was relegated back to Division 3. This is the shirt they wore that year.

How many different stripes does one shirt need? The amber stripes on this shirt all seem to be of uniform width, but the claret ones have three different widths. It's as if Bukta, the shirt's manufacturer could not decide whether to use equal width stripes, pinstripes, or something in between. So they decided to throw all three on there and hope it worked. It didn't.

I can't really tell what's on that badge either. It looks like a boar's head. For a team that is known as The Bantams, and were previously known as the Paraders, this makes no sense. Perhaps it was secondary advertising for a certain maker of sliced meat that the team tried to slip under the radar?

As for the shirt sponsor itself, modern-day Grattan in the UK seems to be the rough equivalent of Sears or Ross in the US--a store which sells a wide range of items, but has a focus on clothing, especially women's. No wonder then that the shirt above was the last season that Grattan sponsored Bradford City. With fashion advertising like that, who would need rivals to steal business?