Umbro Is Football’s Original Fashion Brand
It’s fitting that perhaps the greatest football brand of the 20th century was born in the back of a pub. In the early 1920s, the Humphrey brothers, Harold and Wallace, began flogging sportswear — ballooning shorts and thick cotton polo shirts — from the back of their mother’s drinkery in Mobberley, a small Northern English village. By 1934, their brand, Umbro, was outfitting both teams in the FA Cup Final: Manchester City and Portsmouth.
At the 1966 World Cup, Umbro was producing kits for 15 of the 16 participating nations. By 1992, the Premier League — the most famous football league in the world — was founded. That year, half of the participating teams wore Umbro. Umbro was on top. To many of us, it still is.
At the tail end of the 20th century, this humble maker of homespun sportswear had become football’s singular defining brand. “For a lot of fans, their earliest and strongest football memories are tied to teams wearing Umbro,” says Doug Bierton, co-founder of Classic Football Shirts, which specializes in grail-status kits from the brand’s halcyon days. “The best [football] shirts always take you back to something, and Umbro has been present in so many defining moments.”
Looking through Umbro’s expansive back catalog of now-collectible kits doesn’t just show that the brand was ubiquitous; it presents a series of often-overlooked innovations. This is essentially the inventor of stylish football gear. In fact, beyond football, it paved the way for today’s fashion-sportswear tie-up.
“What is underappreciated is that Umbro understood very early-on that sport is also about image and style,” says Professor Andrew Groves, director of the Westminster Menswear Archive. “People talk about sportswear and fashion as if it’s a recent crossover, but Umbro got there decades earlier.” In fact, it was laying the groundwork for this crossover as early as 1955, with the “Sportswear X-Mas Pack.” This Umbro invention feels obvious now, but at the time, it was remarkably novel. In the ’50s, football kits were only available in bulk and exclusively worn by players. The idea of replica fan-wear, or simply selling kits individually, was unheard of. Just in time for the holidays, Umbro started selling a complete set direct to consumers: a football kit, shorts, and socks in the colors of the most prominent clubs, the kind of thing that’s now a mainstay. This is, in a way, the precursor to every football-themed lifestyle collection released since, they’re innumerable.
Umbro’s first collaboration arrived that same year. Teddy Tinling, a 6’7” World War II spy who became a leading designer of tennis clothing, was invited to design Umbro tennis uniforms worn by four Wimbledon champions. The “Styled by Matt Busby” range came next, with the Manchester United manager creating a range of deep V-neck Umbro tees.
This is ages before the seismic streetwear-induced shift that made fashion collaborations commonplace. And Umbro’s prescience earned it attention far beyond the sports pages. In 1963, fashion trade publication Draper’s deemed Harold Humphreys “the Dior of the football world.” Who could’ve known that the brand’s most stylish years were still to come?
As the 20th century progressed, football kits evolved from basic cotton jerseys to breathable nylon sportswear in occasionally kaleidoscopic colors. Umbro was at the forefront of it all. “Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, Umbro felt like football itself,” Groves says. “It was everywhere: on the pitch, on the terraces, in the street, and in the wider culture around the game.”
Bierton concurs. “Umbro felt like the OG growing up. So many clubs wore it,” he says. “When you look back, a huge number of iconic moments happened in Umbro shirts: Brazil winning the World Cup in ’94, Ronaldo’s first season at Inter, Ajax winning the Champions League in ’95.”
Now we’re getting into Umbro’s heyday. The ’90s leading into the early 2000s were peak Umbro, epitomized by indigo England kits designed to be paired with jeans and reversible shirts offering fans two different colors. “The shirts really stood out from the others,” says Louis Bever, a photographer and the proud owner of more than 350 vintage football shirts. “And that’s probably why Umbro was one of the biggest shirt manufacturers in the ’90s and early noughties: Every shirt it made was iconic.”
These iconic shirts were crossing over into pop culture like never before. England’s third shirt from 1990 was only worn in one game yet remains one of the most sought-after to this day, with vintage examples reselling for north of $600. “It was one of the first shirts in history to gain its fame through wider culture,” Bierton says. “The sky-blue geometric pattern was part of that new wave of experimental kit design, but it became iconic through music, worn by Bernard Sumner of New Order in the video for ‘World in Motion,’” the theme song for England’s World Cup campaign. Then, during Britpop’s mid-90s boom, Blur’s Damon Albarn wore an Umbro Chelsea home shirt in Japanese magazine Crossbeat while the lead singer of the band’s biggest rival, Liam Gallagher, hit the stage in an Umbro drill top, the sportswear brand’s inimitable collared pullover. “An Umbro tracksuit on anyone is a sports tracksuit, but [Liam Gallagher] managed to make it look like the most desirable item of clothing,” Serge Pizzorno from Kasabian later said. “He managed to make it look like Gucci or something, and I bought one and wore it to school.”
In the background, a great purging of small football kit makers was taking shape. From the late ’90s to the mid 2010s, countless brilliant kitmakers fell to obscurity. French label Le Coq Sportif, maker of the early Argentina kits worn by Maradona and co., fell to the wayside along with American brand PONY, best known for its classic West Ham kits, and the Italian giant NR, once labeled the “Caravaggio of jerseys” by the magazine Sport di Piu. Enzo Raccuglia, founder of the latter, recently said, “Once the big international companies came in, we could not compete… They were able to offer more money.”
It was a similar story for Umbro. “The entry price as a brand for football became too expensive,” says Helene Hope, Umbro’s head of global marketing. “There’s so much money in football that even third-league clubs are asking for more than top teams used to. Other brands came in and just outspent brands like Umbro.” The biggest blow came in 2012. Nike, which purchased Umbro in 2008 for around $582 million, pinched Umbro’s most famous contract: making England’s international kits. A month later, the $225 million sale of Umbro to Iconix Brand Group, its current owner, was announced, leaving Umbro in what Hope calls “a bit of a twilight zone.”
“The brand had to recenter again. What we really want to do is have a clear identity,” Hope says. This still includes manufacturing a significant number of kits each year, including for this writer’s very beloved Ipswich Town, but it also includes venturing into new, stylish territory.
“As the global sportswear market changed in the 2000s and 2010s, competition became increasingly driven by scale, sponsorship, and global marketing power,” Groves says. “What is interesting is that Umbro responded by building on something those bigger brands could not easily replicate: its depth of heritage and cultural credibility. Umbro’s importance did not disappear; it shifted.” When conducting research for the 2024 exhibition Umbro 100: Sportswear x Fashion, Groves uncovered that in 2002, Umbro orchestrated the first full collection between a fashion label and a sportswear brand with Umbro by Paul Smith. (There had been luxury sneaker collaborations prior to this, such as Yohji Yamamoto x adidas and PUMA x Jil Sander, but Umbro by Paul Smith was the first to include clothing.)
The collaborations kept coming. Even as Umbro went through turbulent times, changing owners and finding itself increasingly at discount retailers, its team-ups were ahead of the curve. Umbro by Kim Jones arrived in 2005, when the ex-Louis Vuitton and Dior creative director was still fresh out of Central Saint Martins. In 2011, avant-innovator Aitor Throup created Umbro’s high-tech Archive Research Project, Groves’ favorite Umbro project. “Throup went into the archive, selected seven historic garments, and reworked them through movement, anatomy, and construction,” he says. “The result pushed football and sportswear design forward in a way that still feels current. You can still see its influence in how designers approach panelling, ergonomics, and the relationship between performance and silhouette.”
Umbro x Palace debuted a year later, further shaking up footie history by recreating iconic England shirts. “It caused an uproar in the skate world,” Lev Tanju, Palace’s co-founder, previously told me. “Everyone thought [skateboarding and football] should be completely separate.” Again, Umbro got there first, and everyone followed: Countless skate brands now create football shirts and collaborate on football gear.
Umbro has pressed on from there, working with every big name in streetwear — Supreme, Patta, Aries — while tapping niche talent (such as this brand with fewer than 2,000 Instagram followers) to create products you don’t associate with Umbro (such as high-end Italian Umbro tailoring). But it’s the Milanese streetwear company OG Slam Jam, whose Umbro partnership started in 2023, that has produced the most viral oddities, including archival training tops fitted with balaclavas and chainmail football kits.
Groves calls this collection “genuinely unexpected” and “one of the most interesting things the brand has done in years.” Not to mention, it gives the brand something else to add to the long list of things it did first: medieval football attire. In the lead-up to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the brand has continued to churn out interesting collaborations. And by now, the rest of the world has caught on.
