Spanish Soccer Players Ham It Up With Tasteful Jerseys

To score attention, teams wear shirts depicting local fare; broccoli, octopus

Describing the home uniform of Spanish soccer team CD Guijuelo is easy—all green with white shorts. It is the club’s road jersey that defies traditional nomenclature.

From the stands it looks it looks vaguely pink, or maybe red streaked with white. But really, the technical term for that shade would be ibérico ham. The explanation is simple: Guijuelo’s jersey is entirely covered with pictures of pork.

“Everyone likes to see a team take risks,” said J. David Ponce of Daen Sport, which produced the jersey.

This particular risk, revealed before the start of the season in August, had the national press giggling all over it. Spanish sports daily Mundo Deportivo ranked it among the ugliest jerseys in history. Most were just confused. “The result is as unusual as it is tasty,” wrote Marca, another sports paper.

In most of the soccer world, jersey colors are sacred. Dark red and blue stripes mean FC Barcelona first. All white belongs to Real Madrid, one of the most famous teams in Europe. No one has dared change those in more than half a century.

But to get noticed, small teams up and down Spain have become highly adventurous in their jersey design. Clubs have used broccoli, tuxedo and octopus shirts to generate attention where the players can’t.

Guijuelo has a perfectly good excuse. The club’s president, Jorge Hernandez, happens to be commercial director of Beher, an award-winning producer of jamón ibérico in a corner of Spain that prides itself on its pigs.

His team, which toils in Spain’s third tier of professional soccer, is more obscure. It never plays before more than a few thousand fans. So, Mr. Hernandez decided, it was time for the club to piggyback on the ham.

Now the players run around the field looking like charcuterie plates with shoes. A fashion statement, Mr. Hernandez felt, to break “the monotony of traditional shirts in football.”

The ham jersey was inspired by the more vegetarian-friendly shirts at La Hoya Lorca CF, another club in Spain’s third tier. La Hoya Lorca hails from the agricultural region of Murcia, where several of its directors are involved in farming broccoli. The vegetables, they say, are their identity.

In 2013, they printed what the club called “the best known part of the broccoli,” up close and personal, right across the jersey. They rendered individual florets the size of marbles—although the whole thing looks something like a plate of peas. The idea was to promote their work all over the country. At home, where people already realize the importance of broccoli farming, the players wear more conservative blue-and-white stripes.

Ham jersey

Despite playing in the equivalent of the minor leagues, La Hoya Lorca is so well known for its jersey pattern that it is goes nationally by the nickname “El brocoli mecanico” (the clockwork broccoli).

“Seeing it for the first time the players were surprised, like everyone was,” said club president Luis Jimenez Moya. “But later they realized the importance of what they represented and were proud of it.”

The club sold several thousand jerseys world-wide after unveiling the broccoli, mainly to collectors. It also caught the attention of Guijuelo’s Mr. Hernandez.

The initial idea for the ham jersey, the club said, was for a single slice slapped on the front, though that version was never produced. Instead, they decided to go the full hog: Daen cloned the same smaller slice onto a pattern nearly 7 feet by 7 feet to cover every inch of the shirt. Any echo of the “meat dress” that Lady Gaga wore to a 2010 awards show was purely coincidental.

As with the broccoli bump of 2013, Daen sold 3,000 ham jerseys in the two weeks after launching it.

Real Madrid and Adidas last year dipped into the world of haute couture for an alternate jersey, worn in high-profile European games. The club called on a Japanese fashion designer known for his avant-garde men’s tailoring, Yohji Yamamoto. He drew up a slick black number that featured intricate drawings of mythical beasts across the front: a king dragon and a bird dragon.

“It’s very nice,” defender Marcelo, a Brazilian player for Real Madrid, said at the time. “And I identify with dragons.”

Local pride motivated CD Lugo, another soccer club, last season. It commissioned two food-related jerseys from a company called Enfios. One was designed as a photo-realistic pint of beer, all amber and bubbles with white foam near the neckline, because the team is sponsored by a brewery. The other was a black goalkeeper’s jersey with an octopus tentacle slithering across the front.

To the designers, no combination could be more natural. Good soccer and beer go together, said an Enfios representative. And the octopus is “a food from Lugo with the sporting skills of a goalkeeper.”

CD Lugo didn’t use the jerseys all season, saving them for special occasions. But if we’re talking about jerseys for special occasions, then Cultural y Deportiva Leonesa, another third-tier team, is impossible to ignore.

For the club’s 90th anniversary games last season, it brought formalwear to the field. Danish sportswear manufacturer Hummel produced a set of one-off uniforms made to look like tuxedos, bow tie included.

People immediately called it “the most hideous design,” Hummel’s chief marketing officer Henning Nielsen said. But, he added, in a market that is dominated by sportswear giants, being a smaller company “gives us the freedom to be creative in different ways.”

The point, quite apart from a jersey’s basic function of helping teammates recognize each other, was always to provoke a reaction. The gimmick-shirt clubs are all up front about this.

“It is something where you’re dividing the world in half,” Mr. Nielsen said.

Or, in Guijuelo’s case, into delicately butchered, paper-thin slices.

Source: WSJ