Welcome to The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever

For too long, people have poked fun at football kits that we're reliably informed are badly designed, garishly coloured or just plain ridiculous. Look around on the web and it won't be long before you stumble upon the usual blog articles; someone describing why Jorge Campos always looked stupid in his dayglo outfits or why David Seaman's Euro 96 kit was terrible... and that's if you're lucky enough to get a description at all.

Quite honestly, we think you deserve better, and to that end we're launching an antidote to this endless stream of puerile banality. We bring you, The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever.

Every day for the next seven weeks or so, we'll be bringing you a blog post that highlights the brilliance of football shirt design. From shadow patterns to subtlety, from commemorative shirts to controversial shirts, we'll be telling you about the great and the good from a world of colour, creativity and sometimes sheer genius.

And we say 'we' with good reason. Rather than just being a Football Attic series, we thought we'd team up with two people who know more about kit design than the rest of those naysayers put together.

First of all, there's our good friend Jay, resident blogger at DesignFootball.com and a man with a discerning eye for good football shirt design. There's also John Devlin, author of the football kit bibles 'True Colours (Volume 1 and 2)' and someone who understands the detail of a football shirt - because at some point he's probably had to illustrate it!

Together, the four of us, along with a few special guest writers, have taken the time and effort to explain why 50 football shirts are great in the hope that you'll see their design in a different way. And to help you keep track of which shirts have featured in our countdown, we've created a page that lists each and every one, along with an explanation of how this series came about.

The 50 Greatest Football Shirts Ever begins tomorrow, and we encourage you to get involved by sending us your feedback and comments. We hope you enjoy it!

-- Chris and Rich