GAMBA OSAKA HOME 1993

FFT's shirt specialist tumbled down a J.League rabbit hole and came up clutching a fine effort from its debut season

- Phil Delves

Growing up in the UK, I was frequently fascinated by the shirts of sides from further afield. My initial exposure to foreign interpretations would often come through video games like FIFA or Football Manager, and a handful of Google searches and Wikipedia pages later, I'd find myself deep in the kit archives of clubs from MLS or the Bundesliga (German and Austrian).

A division I repeatedly returned to was the J.League. Few competitions could challenge the combination of colour, flair and sponsorship prowess, and its early seasons were especially exciting. The Japanese top tier enjoyed a boom from the outset as the inaugural campaign, in 1993, was illuminated by a frankly unbelievable assortment of jerseys. Many of these patterns are ones you'll be intimately familiar with, such is the impact the league made on our collective consciousness during that time. From the SEGA-sponsored JEF Ichihara shirts to Verdy Kawasaki (now Tokyo Verdy) and their stunning Coca-Cola-backed green sunburst kit, Mizuno – who worked in tandem with every J.League club – clearly had plenty of fun.

Although less heralded from a shirt perspective than their peers, Gamba Osaka quietly fashioned the finest designs of the bunch. The sponsor ties into the whole aesthetic wonderfully, and in ways that aren't crystal clear on first inspection.