Getting Shirty

Date: 28th August 2025

Getting Shirty

By Donald C Stewart

Be honest. Have you dumped it yet? Maybe stuffed it in the bottom of the cupboard or have been trying to find a place at the back of the drawer that you won’t accidentally pull it out from.

Or have you just donated it to charity, hoping that nobody realises that that is the team that you support, even though you know everybody else does know that that is the team that you support.

I’m not talking about the scarf. That’s an heirloom passed down generation to generation.

I’m talking about the new kit, the new shirt, the XXXXL that has adorned your body, hopefully at the beginning of the season, but now after a dismal League Cup campaign it was feeling slightly soiled on your back.

To make matters worse, you’re now into the first few weeks of the League campaign, and things have not improved. Perhaps you have chanted sack the board or thought in your head that it would be better if the manager just walked or that all of these wonderful professionals who’ve signed contracts are empty shirts only in it for the cash. And so, your support is waning and you’re beginning to feel that you should fling that shirt into some sort of bin and not the one that every week gets emptied, washed, ironed and returned to the drawers.

Our relationship with all of the clobber that is available to us inside the various grounds that we visit is personal. Consider therefore a moment, not the sponsorship logo that’s on the front of the shirt, but the message it conveys.

In the recent past, we have become very shirty, if I can use that pun, over whether or not we should have any sponsorship from any bookmaker, given that we are hammering any professional footballer who dares to enter one of their premises.

This year down in Wales at Newport County, they have taken a very interesting approach with their away strip – including the names of 36 children who came to Caerleon in 1937, as well as phrases in Welsh, English and Basque.

This part of Wales welcomed 36 children, relocated from the Basque country in Bilbao after Guernica was bombed in the Spanish Civil War. They fled the bombing to set up life in Wales.

And so this season, Newport County’s away shirt is modelled on Atletico Bilbao’s shirt, who are a very interesting club in themselves – they will only sign players from the Basque country.

This relationship between Atletico Bilbao and Newport County has been cemented over decades and is based on a local community welcoming in Spanish children escaping war.

It’s interesting in the context of where we are in the world now, as increasing numbers of people are joining protests outside of hotels, that here we have an example of innocent children moved from a place of war into a place of safety and given the haven that they needed without question or thought.

Of course, shirt sponsorship has seen several charities getting to the front of a football shirt. That included a year or so ago at Greenock Morton, who were the first to put the veterans’ charity at Erskine, which is local to Greenock Morton, and the football club itself, on the front of their away shirt. It cemented a relationship between the two.

There are many more examples, including Barcelona and the Save the Children Fund, where statements are being made, not just to the footballing authorities, but also to the world in general, that this is the type of institution we wish to become.

Wasn’t it Gandhi who said be the change that you want to see?

And so, as you pick up that shirt and contemplate who is on the front of it, whether it be one of the sponsors who had to get into a draw to be pulled out of a hat to claim the space on the shirt, or they happen to be a multi-millionaire somewhere in the world who has an affinity and soft spot for that club, or a world-famous pop group like Wet Wet Wet who sponsored Clydebank.

But it is more special for Newport County, not just because they have sold more shirts abroad than they have at home, making it an interesting commercial decision.

And so, when you go and you buy whatever it is that you wish to get in the club shop, be it a key ring, the dressing gown, the mug, the scarf, make sure it goes somewhere safe.

Because in years to come, like the Clydebank shirt with Wet Wet Wet on the front it may become a collector’s edition, or it might, like the Newport County shirt, encourage a little tear in the eye, like it did for the club’s creative director, Neil Heard.

And let’s be honest, it’s a hell of a lot better than the tear you shed when you’re getting humped by lower league opposition in some far-flung place of Scotland on a weight-drizzly October night in the far reaches of a cup competition, that you never wanted to be part of.

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Tags: football shirts, oor Donald, SFSA