#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.

#37 - Brighton & Hove Albion 1985-87 Home Shirt by adidas

As I hinted at in my write-up for the French 1980-84 shirt (number 38 in our run-down for those who missed it) It seems to me that adidas have always saved their best designs for the continent. It's certainly the case today where the flair and glamour of their European strips far overshadow creatively the more sober designs we see in the UK.

However, if I can take you back 30 years to a small club on the south coast of England... there was one set of strips that threatened to buck that trend.

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They belonged to Brighton & Hove Albion of the Second Division, and as far as I know their incredibly striking outfits were not worn anywhere else in the UK and were seldom seen in Europe, come to that.

#38 - France 1980-84 Home Shirt by adidas

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Forgive me for taking a slightly anglophilic approach as I look back at this beautiful France home kit, worn from 1980 to 1984 by the likes of Michel Platini, Jean Tigana and Dominque Rochteau.

Although designs such as this may have been common on the continent in the early 1980s, in the UK at the time this manner of football clobber was the very peak of foreign glamour and mystery. Especially when you consider so many British contemporary kits of the era were still stuck in the 70s.

#39 - USA 1992-94 Home Shirt by adidas

One of the most seismic shifts in kit design occurred in 1991. Adidas, of Trefoil logo fame and enduring sleeve stripes - with very few exceptions to this rule on football shirts - dispensed, overnight, with both of these immediately recognisable elements.

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The inception of the “adidas EQUIPMENT” logo, and related bold shirt styling, shocked sportswear and football fans alike. My memory of this drastic changeup was that it began with the largely sublimated 1991-92 Liverpool shirt, but this may be subjectivity rather than fact. Regardless, it was a staggering development, and one that took its time to settle.

#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.