Greatest Uniforms in Sports, No. 25: Juventus FC

Juventus-FC

If you’re going to carry the mantle of greatness on the pitch for an entire football-mad nation and its diaspora across the globe, you’d better look damn good doing it. Juventus, winners of more Serie A titles than any other club and two Champions League titles, are up to the task. But the signature look of the Bianconeri (“white and black”)—sleek, minimal, intimidating—was originally something very different.

The club was founded in 1897 and started out wearing pink jerseys. One version of the story holds that the flamboyant shirts were fading in the wash, another that Juventus simply wanted a new look. Either way, club member John Savage, a Brit, came to the rescue in 1903, procuring a set of black-and-white striped uniforms donated by English club Notts County. A legend was born—or borrowed, anyway.

These days, Notts County is down on the third tier of British soccer and still wearing their stripes. The Italian club to whom they once gave the shirts off their backs, however, has spent the past century dominating Serie A. But Juventus has never forgotten the favour; when they inaugurated their new stadium in Turin in 2011, they did it with a friendly against Notts County.

But even a classic must evolve with the times. The latest iteration of Juve’s kit is rife with symbolic meaning and defiant pride. The four stripes on the current shirts represent the values of the Agnelli family, which took over the team in 1923: family, union, loyalty and honour.

Honour is something they protect. In days past, Le Zebre added a star above their crest for every 10 Serie A titles, but after the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal of 2006, the Italian Football Federation stripped the club of the 2005 and 2006 Scudetto trophies. When, in 2011–12, they topped the league again, Juventus felt they’d earned their third star. “When we count our title wins, they are 30,” club president Andrea Agnelli said. “We no longer acknowledge the Federation’s arithmetic and therefore we’ve removed the stars from our shirt.” Instead, they wear their protest: The jerseys bear the bird-flipping inscription “30 sul campo” (“30 on the pitch”) under the crest. And if you want a snapshot of Juventus’s self-image, consider the immortal words of Giampiero Boniperti, one of the greatest ever to wear the black and white, which are stitched inside the jersey’s collar: “Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that counts.”

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