That's the thing; simplicity is best with football shirts, but it's hard for clubs and kit manufacturers to justify buying a new shirt each year if it barely changes. Simplicity doesn't offer much scope for variance.
Think you're being a bit too nice letting Nike off the hook like that. The issue isn't the constraints of tradition/simplicity. The issue is talented people - many of them industry professionals, not that you have to be one - looking at Nike's work and knowing with absolute certainty that Nike are flat-out making a mockery of their clients, design-wise.
This is not to say we're getting shafted overall. It's a complicated issue. I'm sure Nike shows the club reps nice pie charts and such containing focus group feedback on which designs tested most positively across the widest range, and hence project to help expand/maintain the club's image worldwide, blah blah all that marketing jazz. But at the same time, I will bet that in those focus groups, Nike aren't showing their better, slightly more expensive designs. A 50p/unit difference in production cost adds up.
Okay, why am I doing like a marketing case-study. Bottom line, Nike are shafting all their football clients in terms of design.
That looks exactly like something a local tee-shirt shop made for our pee-wee league team. In 1983. I'm not even making that up.
This is even more annoying when you see how much time and money they invested in their upcoming NFL (American football) uniforms, for example. Yeah, it's only Celtic, but come on. That's just wrong.
Nike are having an absolute shocker.
If by shocker, you mean '
excellent time reclining on this pristine Caribbean beach feeling the sand between their toes while back in Beaverton a high-school intern on $8/hr hastily throws up some shirt templates on Illustrator before the soccer-mom focus group arrives' then yes.
