A few years ago Cameroon upset the Fifa bureaucrats when they pitched up at the 2006 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) tournament, hosted by Tunisia, sporting red-and-green bodysuits.
They had radically broken with the Fifa convention stipulating that a football kit comprises a shirt and a pair of shorts. “It goes against the laws of the game,” Sepp Blatter was quick to say. “The rules are very clear — there is one shirt, one [pair of] shorts and one [pair of] socks.”
The new-look Cameroon design featured a body-hugging strip to minimise the effect of jersey-pulling — quite rife in the game. “Their players were like track stars, very speedy, and one of the advantages to a one-piece suit was that their shirts couldn’t be pulled out of their shorts,” said Jochen Zeitz, chief executive of Puma, which masterminded the design.
Fashionistas worldwide responded enthusiastically, applauding its infusion of sexual allure, quirky design and streetwise innovation to a game that still had a rather staid fashion sense.
Perhaps Puma’s designers had eavesdropped on Blatter two years previously, when he advised women footballers to wear body-hugging uniforms. “Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball,” he said in 2004 to howls of outrage from feminists.
“They could, for example, have tighter shorts. Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men — such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?”
Like Cameroon’s 2002 sleeveless shirts — reminiscent of basketball jerseys (also banned by Fifa) — their Tunisian Afcon strip was meant to be trendy and to appeal across sporting disciplines.
Most of the teams at this year’s Afcon tournament are dressed by Puma. The sporting conglomerate has stuck to its well-worn script of revealing, slick uniforms — fabric pasted to the skin, in effect.
This is proving popular with some of my women friends. One posted an ecstatic message on Facebook that said: “Forget the scores. The issue is who has the sexiest uniform at [Afcon] 2010? Angola 10, everyone else zero!”
When I posted a link to Cameroon’s one-piece bodysuit, she responded: “What was that ugly thing? The designer missed the point of sexy dressing — not to reveal too much … errrm whatever! The Angolans and Puma got it right.”
The Angolans, in their tight-fitting red shirts and black shorts, would win the popularity contests. They’re not built like wrestlers, West African style. Tall and gangly, most look like track champions; indeed, watching them chase a ball is almost like watching a gazelle sprint across a savanna plain.
Angola’s uniform is based on the same blueprint that spawned the strips worn by Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique and Algeria, yet it is the Angolans who have attracted most of the non-football interest — that is, especially from women. Perhaps it’s the heavy colours, black and red, that have weighted affection in their favour?
Mali, in a ghostly white, and Gabon, in yellow and blue, have the distinction of donning possibly the ugliest shirts. As I watched Mali come back from 4-0 down to draw the match in the last 15 minutes of the game, I couldn’t help connecting their belaboured first-half form with their baggy, journeyman strip.
This is not as absurd as it sounds; in 1996 Manchester United changed into blue kit at half-time after a horror first half in which they were wearing grey and found themselves 0-3 down. Something worked, because they netted three goals in the second half — although they still lost 6-3. They lost four out of five games in grey and they retired that kit forthwith.
It would have been good to see Mali and Angola, teams espousing opposing fashion philosophies, meet again later in the tournament. As an avid fan of the game, it could be preposterous for me to say: “Let the best-dressed team win.” That’s against the spirit of football, isn’t it?