#2 - England 2009-10 Home Shirt by Umbro

It's time for us to reveal the Second Greatest Football Shirt Ever, but which one will it be? So many iconic designs haven't even been mentioned in our countdown so far, and they can't all occupy the final two spaces of our list... so which shirt takes its place at Number 2? The answer is as follows:

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It's England's home shirt, worn during 2009 and 2010. Look up 'understated' in the dictionary and you'll find the above picture in the definition.

A great football shirt can be defined in many ways; complexity of detail, use of colour, acknowledgement of tradition, originality of design, sheer modernity... but this one has its own clearly defined qualities. Here are our comments to hopefully explain why our second best shirt is really all-white...

#13 - Manchester United 1992-94 Third Shirt by Umbro

We should never let the truth get in the way of a good story, and boy is the background to Manchester United's 1992-94 Third shirt a good story. If you're sitting comfortably, then I shall begin...

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Actually, let's just cut to the chase. The legend goes that Man United's forebear, the Newton Heath (Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway) Cricket & Football Club, were presented with cashmere shirts in green and gold in their second season in existence. In fact, reports of such an item existing are scarce, and it may be not beyond the realms of possibility that until Umbro came up with this supposedly retrospective design to add to their new United Home and blue Away shirts, neither the Red Devils nor their progenitor ever wore green and yellow/gold halves.

#21 - Universitario 2013 88th Anniversary Shirt by Umbro

And so we come to another limited edition shirt on this list (yet again nominated by me), though this one encountered very little resistance due to its staggering beauty.

Released to celebrate Peruvian club Universitario's 88th year (oh come on, since when has that been any kind of event?), Umbro stripped things right back and went full-on retro.

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Despite being a very minimal design, there are several features that make this shirt great. Firstly, the whole thing is constructed from Umbro's lush cotton used on so many of their 'Tailored By' range.

And then there's the details. Starting from the top, we find a neat, trimmed collar which then has a neck opening that extends almost all the way down to the abdomen; a brave move given how most manufacturers still try to keep their tribute shirts within the bounds of modern features.

#25 - Scotland 1988-91 Home Shirt by Umbro

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For me this beautiful shirt is one of the best Scotland jerseys of all time and was a massive departure from the designs that preceded it.

The shirt appeared on the cusp of the retro football influence that transformed a purely modernist approach to football fashion that occurred throughout the '80s. This Scotland shirt was first worn in May 1988 in a home international match against England and introduced an era of button down collars accompanied by a placket or opening in the neck. Button-down collars were to find their way on to virtually every Umbro shirt over the next three or four years and were rapidly copied by many other smaller sportswear brands at the time.

#34 - Rangers 1987-90 Home Shirt by Umbro

Often in the world of football kit design, the basic, perhaps primitive ideas of yesteryear are dismissed as being too old-fashioned or simplistic. This should never happen, for today's kits have all evolved from those same ground-breaking designs. It's the responsibility of all of us to remember the best of what went before.

This is certainly true of Rangers' home shirt, worn for the last few years of the 1980's. As had been the case since at least the mid-1970's, Umbro were the manufacturers, but here, at last, their latest design was heading in a new, dynamic direction.

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In the few years leading up to 1987, the famous blue Rangers shirt had started to look a little tired, relying on a couple of Umbro’s less inspiring templates for any real excitement. Now, they had a beautiful yet simple checker-board shadow pattern with merely a thin strip of white piping to offset it on the shoulders. There was also a new collar - a round neck with button-up fastening as seen on the England home kit of the same era. Again, understated, but beautifully executed.

#35 - Manchester United 1992-94 Home by Umbro

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Folk are often sceptical about how much influence a kit can have over the fortunes of a team. However I've seen too many examples where a good looking outfit could arguably be seen to play a part in raising confidence levels within a side to dismiss this thinking. Similarly when a new kit supplier arrives with a kitbag full of new ideas, after a long period with a previous incumbent they can be like a breath of fresh air that can also inspire and change for better the fortunes of a stagnating team.

#36 - Watford 1985-88 Home Shirt by Umbro

Thanks to its combination of colours (how does the rhyme go again... yellow, black, red and green should never be seen?) this Watford shirt shouldn't work. The fact that it does, even as it teeters on the edge of an horrific colour clash, is testament to its greatness.

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Sponsor's logo aside, the kit is one of pure class and is another one of those designs that’s proved to be a forerunner of today's outfits thanks in main to the brazen red and black colour bar placed prominently across the chest, divided neatly with a thin yellow stripe. Quite a difference from the kits of the day that, in the main, featured just one primary shirt body colour.

#40 - Athletic Bilbao 2011-12 Away Shirt by Umbro

This isn't the first time I've written about this particular shirt (incidentally, I had also written about the France Techfit shirt previously, here) and it’s often interesting how time passing alters the way we feel about a design.

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Please don’t misunderstand me; I still love the Athletic Club 2011-12 Away shirt as much as I did when it was released, and became iconic in double-quick time. The difference is the context: back then I was enamoured with the fashion for football shirts with some kind of a chest band/stripe, but hindsight tells us this was little more than a fad. The Athletic shirt, on the other hand, has stood the test of years passed.

#41 - Birmingham City 1972-74 Third Shirt by Umbro

The 'Third' kit is an interesting phenomenon. Born out of necessity because the colours on a home or away kit clash with the opposing team (unlikely, you'd have thought), it's now become a license to break as many design rules as the manufacturer sees fit.

We think of Third kits as being a modern-day entity, but look hard enough and you'll find various examples worn by clubs going back many decades... and they're no less wacky in their execution either.

One of the ultimate examples of Third kit theatricality can be found as far back as 1972 when Birmingham City wore a shirt featuring the colours of the West German national flag - black, red and yellow. But be not mislead: this wasn't, for instance, a red shirt with black and yellow trim, oh no. It was a shirt divided equally into thirds - yellow on the left, black on the right and red down the middle.

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Legend has it that this bizarre cavalcade of Teutonic hues came about when Birmingham City went on a pre-season tour to West Germany, a PR stunt designed to ingratiate the St Andrews club with their foreign hosts. Be it true or not, the shirt found its way into the Blues' dressing room on several occasions over a two year period for league games against Tottenham, West Bromwich Albion and, as you can see from the video below, Queens Park Rangers.

#49 - Hull City 2007-08 Home Shirt by Umbro

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Something that this countdown will have plenty of is templates. Very few football shirts through history are unique in every element. In the modern age, panel structure, collar design and sleeve stripe placement and length, for example, will often appear on several shirts of a manufacturer’s stable, over a single season or sometimes staggered over several, before transitioning onto a teamwear range.