Kit Chronicles

The crest is permanent. The name on the other side of the shirt is not. Every major club has passed through the hands of more than one manufacturer over the decades — three stripes giving way to a swoosh, a swoosh giving way to a leaping cat, each deal lasting anywhere from a single season to almost thirty years.

Most entries below mark a genuine manufacturer change, not a re-signing — a club that walked out for a new season in a shirt stamped with a different name than the one it wore the year before. A handful, where only one deal is on record, instead mark the first name known to have made the shirt. Sorted chronologically, oldest first, each one dated to the year the deal took effect.

A handful of these deals were decades long — Milan and Adidas ran from 1999 to 2018, Chelsea and Umbro from 1988 to 2006 — while others barely lasted a season before a bigger offer arrived. A few clubs have gone back to a brand they already left once: Lyon returned to Adidas in 2011 after an eight-year spell in Umbro, and Fenerbahçe has cycled through Adidas three separate times since 1989. The shirt changes hands; the badge on it never does.