Pretty in pink?
It's hard not to please a kid with a classic all-white Real Madrid shirt with optional Zinedine Zidane (No 5), Ronaldo (No 9) or David Beckham (No 23) on the back but parents beware there have always been football shirts that should go straight to the bottom of the wardrobe alongside the reindeer socks from Aunt Hilda.
Imagine this year the young fan of Juventus, hoping that Santa would bring a shirt emblazoned with Alessandro Del Piero's name and number (10), unwrapping the present and discovering that instead of the classic black and white stripes he has to wear the pink away shirt.
Pink? Surely that is for the little sister's Barbie doll? But no, this season, the Italian champions are wearing the gentle, pastel shade on their travels. Just what Edgar Davids thinks of this isn't exactly clear, but reports that Paulo Montero is leaving Juventus in the New Year are making more sense.
The excuse offered by the Turin club is they wore pink shirts for their first six years before switching to their famous 'zebra' shirt in 1903 and are cashing in on their history.
Juve adopted black and white stripes after wrongly receiving and keeping a strip meant for Notts County a century ago.
Since then those colours have become world famous as Juve have won their 27 titles. They have won nothing in pink even losing 2-0 in pink to Lazio last week.
Away shirts have always presented the greatest threat to tradition and good taste.
Sportswear manufacturers know they risk provoking protest if they tinker with traditional colours for home shirts as French club Bordeaux discovered in the 1990's when their president tried to switch from blue to claret.
But the away kit and increasingly the shameless profiteering known as the 'third kit' has long been treated as a blank canvas for the creative types in the design departments.
Hiding somewhere is the person responsible for Coventry City's all-brown kit of the 1970's which also featured cream 'piping'. It won a recent internet poll for the worst football kit of all-time, edging out such classic eyesores as the splattering of yellow and green that Norwich made their players wear in 1993 or the Arsenal away shirt of the same year.
Yellow tends to be a bad idea, especially if you start 'improving' it. Norwich have a number of contenders for worst football shirt, while the fashion sense of the Australian soccer federation leaves a lot to be desired, considering the jerseys they deck their players out in. Generally, national shirts are reasonably free from any design disasters which is a good thing. Nobody wants the honour of representing your country destroyed by pulling on an abomination.
Everyone remembers Scotland's kit in the 1986 World Cup, but that was more for the ridiculous ring around the shorts than the shirt itself, a plain navy number. Belgium have had their fair share of terrible jerseys, perhaps the reason they qualify for so many major tournaments is they burn the eyeballs of their opponents. Even our own proud green has been tinkered with. In the mid-nineties, some bright spark at Umbro had the clever idea of putting faint arrows on the shirt. It lasted for an unsuccessful qualification campaign.
Yellow might be bad, as Liverpool fans will testify, but alongside brown and pink, grey ought to have no place on the football field.
Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson blamed grey shirts for his side's poor first half performance in a game at Southampton and changed them at the interval.
Ferguson was mocked for using the shirts as an excuse for a rare heavy defeat but he was right one of the purposes of a shirt colour is to allow quick spotting of the position of a team-mate.
That is partly the reason United's red remains the most popular colour, but as the Old Trafford corporate machine ratcheted up speed in the late nineties, it wasn't only the unusual grey shirt that hurt the eye. Another of their many third shirts had blue and white stripes, but they just looked like Sheffield Wednesday shirts in need of a good wash.
While it is not advisable to wear grey, as it blends into the background, some teams can go too far in their search for a jersey that will be recognised rapidly on the field.
United's red is one of the most popular colours partly for that reason and grey, blending into the background, is probably the worst possible colour for rapid eye recognition.
But such a theory can be taken too far.
Scottish club Morton once wore a garish tartan design on their away shirts. Hull City made a brief stab for immortality when they swapped amber and black stripes, their traditional home kit, for a ludicrous tiger-skin design. Unless you are Dundee United, it is difficult to make an orange colour look tasteful on a footballer. Bristol Rovers had a momentary brush with infamy in 1987 when they travelled England in a tangerine and lemon quartered shirt, while Chelsea spent two full Premiership seasons in a shirt that was, technically, graphite and tangerine, but in reality was grey and orange. A couple of seasons ago, Barcelona joined the list of worst offenders by wearing an away shirt of a particular shade of orange that dazzled most of their opponents.
Greece's AEK Athens were also victims of modern technology allowing for alternatives to the traditional patterns of stripes, hoops or saches.
In the 1998/99 season, AEK lost their yellow and black stripes to a horrific shirt featuring a huge black doubled-headed eagle, the club's logo, splashed across the front of the strip with one of the bird's heads placed carefully one the players' hearts thankfully the shirt lasted for just one season. Although it is a fictional creation, Hardchester United's jersey in the Dream Team series will win no prizes for taste. And yet, people can be seen walking the streets with them. Bolton's away kit in 1997 was a similar hue of purple to Hardchester's. Events at the Reebok Stadium weren't as exciting that season as Wanderers got relegated.
As well as reinterpreted home kits and ill-judged away colours, the goal-keeping jersey once dominated by good, old green, is also a threat to foot-balling aesthetics.
The "worst" or "best" offender depending on your point of view was Mexico goalkeeper Jorge Campos who was fitted out in a a series of ever more bizarre designs.
ARGUABLY the most ludicrous was an eye-watering day-glo yellow and purple ensemble with huge polka dots. It didn't stop him being a great goalkeeper though but his opponents could hardly shoot straight after almost being blinded by his creations. David Seaman tried the same thing in the Euro 96 semi-final against Germany with a shirt that mixed all of the primary colours. It did little to distract the teutonic focus when it came to penalties.
Given the perception of their eccentricity, it is no wonder some keepers feel the need to dress absurdly. Peter Schimechel had a fair number of crazy designs on his back, while at present, nobody comes near Buffon for noticeable attire. Now, the away shirt his team-mates have to wear this year are beginning to make sense. Buffon was the world's most expensive keeper not just for ability, but for his fashion sense.
Garish kits are not just a modern phenomenon though. Middlesbrough Ironopolis, a short-lived club from the north-east of England who actually reached the quarter-finals of the FA Cup in 1893, turned out in maroon shirts with light green stripes.
Formed in 1889, clearly they missed out on the financial bonanza that such a bizarre design would have afforded them in the replica kit age of a century later, and folded, penniless after one season in the second division of the English league in 1894.
Let them be a lesson for others.
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