Now Playing Everywhere: Soccer Nostalgia
On Soccer
From Arsenal’s jerseys to a trio of recent films, a reverence for the late 1980s and early 1990s is on full display in the modern game.
MANCHESTER, England — The sleeves had to change.
For the last five years, Arsenal’s jerseys were produced by the German sportswear brand Puma, and they had always featured a version of what is known as a raglan sleeve, in which the color extends all the way to the collar.
Last October, though, Adidas replaced its rival as Arsenal’s apparel manufacturer. And in the eyes of Adidas designers, Arsenal has always been a set-in sleeve sort of a club. As Inigo Turner, the company’s design director, put it, the set-in sleeve is part of “Arsenal’s DNA.”
Adidas’s problem was a compressed design timeline: Its usual two-year process of research, interviews and visits — all before so much as a preliminary sketch, let alone a final product — would have to be completed in a matter of months in order to release the jerseys this summer.
Fortunately, Turner’s designers had a clear idea in mind anyway: picking up where their predecessors had left off 25 years ago, the last time Adidas made Arsenal’s shirts. The set-in sleeves would come back, and so would the block colors and the V-neck collar. Adidas would run the brand’s three stripes along the shoulder again, too.
The material and the cut would change, of course, but otherwise both the home and away jerseys — the latter borrowing the same “bruised banana” color scheme — would be strikingly redolent of the Arsenal of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It was not the first time Adidas has raided its own archives for ideas: Many of its jerseys at last year’s World Cup in Russia carried with them echoes of previous tournaments. Turner said that was deliberate, then and now. “We take authentic reference points that strike a chord with people and modernize them,” Turner said. He called it “authentic nostalgia.”
Adidas is not the only brand that has found it profitable. A glance at this season’s Premier League jerseys reveals a Chelsea shirt, produced by Nike, that references the uniform the club wore from 1991 to 1993, and a New Balance-designed Liverpool jersey adorned by pinstripes, just like the club wore in 1984. (Newcastle has gone even further back: Its Puma effort has been cast as a homage to its 1969 Fairs Cup-winning team.)
Turner is not surprised the period is proving so popular. Though he admits it might, in part, be an example of what the writer Hadley Freeman has called the 30-year rule — the amount of time needed for children to grow up, secure influential jobs in the creative industries, and then set about restoring the tastes of their own youth to prominence — he also argues much of it is driven by modern youth culture.
“It’s a period in fashion more generally that people are starting to look back on and find interesting,” Turner said. “The crazy patterns, the graphics. There is a nostalgia element, but if you look at skateboarding culture and streetwear, they’re referencing shirts more and more, especially of that era.”
And yet the desire to evoke that specific period of soccer history is not limited to fashion and design. Increasingly, the late 1980s and early 1990s are proving a source of interest, a frame of reference and a fount of stories for filmmakers, too.
Two documentaries set in 1989 were released within a few weeks of each other in 2017 — “89,” telling the story of Arsenal’s remarkable championship victory that year, and “Kenny,” a biopic of Kenny Dalglish, the former Liverpool player and manager, focusing in particular on his role in comforting the club and city in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster.
This year, the Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia — whose previous work includes the documentaries “Senna” and “Amy” — added “Maradona”to the canon. It takes as its focus not Diego Maradona’s whole career, from his roots in Buenos Aires to his spell as a coach in Mexico this year, but rather his exalted, explosive and eventually destructive period at Napoli between 1984 and 1991.
Much of the footage Kapadia used is archival, shot by two cameramen hired by Maradona’s agent, Jorge Cyterszpiler, to follow his client during his playing days and document his life. They were granted astonishing access — they were, at times, even allowed to film on the field — but the film they were supposed to be making never came into existence. Instead, the video recordings lay forgotten, on a defunct format, the tapes split between Buenos Aires and Naples. Kapadia had to track it down and painstakingly restore it.
“This is pre-steady cam,” Kapadia said in an interview with Soccer Bible when the film was released. “They are not running round with super digital. It is not perfectly sharp. I love the shakiness of it. It is the imperfections of people, humans, Diego Maradona, the pitches, the kits, the weather, all of that.
“That is what we are trying to show: this is how football used to be. Look at the state of the pitches, the state of the tackles, the kind of characters. It isn’t like that any more. It has been cleaned up, everyone has been P.R.’d, and Maradona was never like that. He is from a different age, and that is what I like.”
Given how much of soccer’s cultural space — the clothes it wears, the films in which it tells its own story — that era now occupies, it is safe to assume others feel the same way.
The late 1980s, the early 1990s — that liminal time between soccer’s pre-modern age and its rebooting in 1992, with the launch of the Premier League and the Champions League — seem to speak to fans more loudly than ever, whether they remember those years or not. It is more than simple nostalgia, not just a cynical attempt to charge fans a fare for a journey down memory lane.
Its appeal is deeper: A time familiar enough not to seem like the distant past — as, say, anything that exists only in black and white might — but, as Kapadia said, still somehow exotic, its earthiness a contrast with the sanitized, corporatized, globalized sport that is slickly produced and relentlessly packaged for our consumption now.
It is a reminder of what soccer looked like before image-rights deals and super agents, before its clubs sold themselves off to oligarchs and hedge funds and nation states. It was more dangerous, of course, for the players and even more for the fans — a grimier, less-refined experience where violence and racism were commonplace. Much of what has been lost would not be welcome back.
Still, though, the demand for the films and the admiration of the jerseys suggests there is a yearning for some of it, at least. “That era hooks into the idea of life before the Premier League, the sense of a connection between the club, the area, the players and the broader tribe of fans,” said the journalist and author Amy Lawrence, a producer of “89.”
“The Arsenal team that won the league that year not only reflected its community in terms of its diversity, but it was a group of players you could drink with, you could talk to, you could know,” Lawrence added. “There was a shared culture that is impossible now.”
To launch its jerseys, Adidas commissioned a video in which Arsenal’s current polyglot squad — Mesut Özil and Alexandre Lacazette and the rest — spoke in north London accents, peppered with street slang. Fans responded almost uniformly positively. “It tapped into something,” Lawrence said.
Three decades ago, back when Arsenal had set-in sleeves, the video would not have made much sense. That team’s core was drawn from London. That was just how they spoke.
To see that bond reimagined for 2019, though, seemed to have a staggering impact. “Arsenal’s fan base has been disconnected from the club for a long time, for complex reasons,” Lawrence said. “That was like plugging the power straight into the source.” It touched off a memory of something real, something authentic. Updated and repackaged, of course, but gratefully received nonetheless by a public mourning its passing.
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