Why Do Premier League Clubs Play in Their Colours?

We treat club colours as if they were carved in stone. Arsenal are red, Liverpool are red, Tottenham are white, and it feels as though they always were and always must be. But almost none of it was inevitable. Dig into the history and you find thrifty committees, borrowed kits, admiring tributes and one very deliberate psychological trick. Here is why the Premier League's most famous clubs wear what they wear, and the surprising true stories behind the colours.

Why Club Colours Matter So Much

A club's colours are the single most powerful part of its identity. Badges get modernised, sponsors come and go, and the kit maker changes every few years, but the core colours usually survive unchanged for over a century. They are how fans recognise their team at a glance, how a shirt becomes instantly readable across a crowded pitch, and how a supporter feels at home the moment they pull one on.

That permanence is exactly why the origins are so surprising. Something now treated as sacred often began as a practical decision or a happy accident in the club's earliest days, before anyone knew the choice would outlive them by more than a century.

Arsenal, Red by Accident

Arsenal's iconic red is the result of pure thrift. When the club was founded in 1886 as Dial Square in Woolwich, three of its early members, Fred Beardsley, Charlie Bates and Bill Parr, had come from Nottingham Forest and brought their old red Forest shirts south with them. Rather than pay for a new set, the cash-strapped club simply kitted everyone out in the same red, and the colour stuck. Arsenal owe their entire visual identity to a few borrowed shirts and a tight budget.

The famous white sleeves came much later, added by the visionary manager Herbert Chapman in 1933 to make the shirt more distinctive. So the two elements that define the Arsenal look, the red and the white sleeves, arrived nearly fifty years apart, one by accident and one by design.

Nottingham Forest, the Club That Coloured the World

The Arsenal story points to a remarkable truth: one club is responsible for a startling amount of the red in world football. Nottingham Forest, founded in 1865, were among the very first clubs anywhere to wear red, a colour said to have been chosen in tribute to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of Italian unification, whose followers wore red shirts.

From that single decision, red spread across the globe. Forest gave red to Arsenal through those hand-me-down kits. Sparta Prague's president visited London, was inspired by Woolwich Arsenal's red, and switched his own club's colours. Forest's touring side thrashed Argentine opposition in 1905, and the president of Independiente was so struck by what he saw that he changed his club's shirt from white and blue to red. Even Juventus owe Forest a debt: their first kits faded too quickly in the wash, so a member wrote to a friend in Nottingham, who sent over a batch of black and white striped shirts from his own club, Notts County. It is an astonishing legacy for one English club, and a reminder that football's colours form a kind of family tree, passed from team to team across borders and decades.

Liverpool and the Birth of All-Red

Liverpool have not always played in all red. In their early years, and for decades afterwards, they wore a red shirt with white shorts, similar in spirit to their neighbours Everton. The all-red identity that now defines the club is much younger than most fans assume, and it came from one of the most famous decisions in football management.

In November 1964, ahead of a European Cup tie against Anderlecht, manager Bill Shankly decided the team should wear red shorts and socks to match the shirt. As his captain Ron Yeats got changed, Shankly reportedly told him: "Christ, Ronnie, you look awesome, terrifying. You look 7ft tall." Shankly believed the solid block of red projected danger and power, intimidating opponents before a ball was even kicked, and the all-red Liverpool has been one of football's most iconic identities ever since. We tell the club's full shirt story in the Liverpool shirts collector's history.

Tottenham and the Tribute to Preston

Tottenham Hotspur's white has a charming origin in imitation. In their early years Spurs experimented with several colour schemes, including a spell in red with navy shorts from 1890, before a brief switch to unusual gold and brown stripes. It was only in 1898 that the club settled on the white they still wear today, and the choice was not accidental.

Preston North End, known as the Lilywhites, were the dominant side of the era, winning the very first English league and FA Cup double in the 1888/89 season without losing a match. Spurs admired Preston's success and adopted their white in the hope of adopting some of it too. The navy and white has been Tottenham's identity ever since, a tribute act that outlived the team it was copying by well over a century.

The 1890 Rule That Forced Clubs to Choose

Some clubs' colours exist because the alternative caused chaos. In 1890, Wolverhampton Wanderers travelled to play Sunderland, and both sides turned out in similar red and white, leaving spectators struggling to tell the teams apart all afternoon. The following season, the Football Association ruled that no two clubs could register identical colours, forcing sides to make a genuine choice for the first time.

Wolves picked old gold and black, taking their cue from the town's own motto, "Out of Darkness Cometh Light." It is a small piece of football administration that quietly shaped the identity of clubs across the country, and a reminder that some colours were chosen not out of passion but simply to avoid confusion on a Saturday afternoon.

Villa, Leeds and the Borrowed Colours

Aston Villa's claret and blue did not originate in England at all. The club took the colours from Scotland, inspired by Heart of Midlothian and Rangers, and the look proved so admired that West Ham United and Burnley later copied it for their own shirts. It is one of several cases where a colour scheme crossed clubs and even borders simply because someone liked how it looked.

Leeds United have worn two very different inspirations across their history. Their first shirts were blue and white stripes, a nod to nearby Huddersfield Town, before the club switched to all white in the 1960s in tribute to the European Cup successes of Real Madrid. Both Villa and Leeds show that a club's colours are sometimes less about the club itself and more about who its founders or managers happened to admire.

Arsenal are red because of a few borrowed shirts and a tight budget in 1886. Once you know the story behind a colour, you never look at the shirt the same way again. That is the real pleasure of collecting.

- Jamie King, co-founder, Mystery Jersey King

Why the Origins Matter to Collectors

Knowing where a club's colours came from changes how you see its shirts. A Nottingham Forest red is not just red once you know the Garibaldi story. An Arsenal shirt carries the ghost of those borrowed Forest kits. A Liverpool shirt from before 1964 would look strange to modern eyes precisely because the all-red identity is younger than the club itself. The history gives every shirt a depth beyond its design.

It also explains why clubs guard their colours so fiercely, and why the rare deliberate departures become such collector's items. When you understand that the home colours are close to sacred, you understand why the exceptions are so prized. We explore many of the shirts built on these identities in the most iconic Premier League shirts from 1992 to today.

Owning a Piece of the Story

Every shirt in a collection carries the whole history of its club's colours, and our retro football shirts collection spans the clubs and eras where those identities were forged.

The other way in is to let the story surprise you. An MJK mystery box sends one genuine football shirt without you knowing which one is coming, any club, any nation, any era, drawn from a supply network spanning more than 50 leagues and 53 countries. Part of the joy is discovering a club, and a colour, whose story you did not know until it arrived at your door.

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