Interesting story doing the rounds on Reddit today, the story of a young man's reworking of the Athletico Madrid jersey in his free time. A way to stay out of trouble no doubt and pass the time, throwing together alternate versions of some of the worlds most recognisable jerseys, that's until the internet found out.
Right, where to start… First off, I should explain. I do a lot of photoshopping. Sometimes for flyers, others for meme-style stuff, etc. Another thing I like to do sometimes is knock out designs for football shirts. I’ve an interest in football shirts in general so it’s something I do mostly out of boredom or to try out different photoshop methods, such as drawing paths, etc. I post some of these designs on [www.footballshirtculture.com](www.footballshirtculture.com), which has a gallery section for user created kit designs.
At the start of January last year, this image appeared on the net showing the yet-unconfirmed 2011/2012 Barcelona kit. We know now that it turned out to be real, but it wasn't known yet at the time.
I recreated the shirt in Photoshop, just out of curiosity. Then, while I had everything open, I knocked out what anAtletico Madrid shirt might look like using the same style. Even though I wasn't fond of it myself, I saved it and uploaded to the gallery and thought nothing more of it.
The next day I look at the site and I notice that my Atletico shirt design was getting a huge number of hits (1000 in a couple of days, while other designs uploaded around the same time were barely hitting the hundreds, which is the normal amount). I checked the comments for it and saw that someone had posted saying that the reason my design was getting so many hits was because the Spanish press were circulating my picture as a genuine leak. A quick Google search, and I found this article.
Here’s a Google translation:
The design of the new shirt of Atletico Madrid for the 2011-12 season saw the light in the Dutch website dedicated to footballshirtculture.com. This shirt would end up with stripes on the sleeves and incorporate a total of seven red stripes on eight other white, unlike the five traditional red. The main change would be that the red lines would lose thickness as they move toward the bottom of the shirt for the white parts. The neck, which last season was red and it was changed to white, disappear for the 2011-12 and thus give a more in polo shirts and less. The new red and white uniform is always one of the best kept secrets as a sports brand that sponsors the club always likes to keep the mystery about how it will be the shirt. Therefore, to uncover new project now, Nike could consider a change to the model that has been discovered by this website or redesign a new model. In addition to the shirt of Atletico, the Dutch website also uncovered the design of future zamarra of Barcelona, very similar to Atleti, but Blaugrana, the Arsenal, Manchester United or Ajax.
Another quick search then brought up this thread on www.colchonero.com, which from what I could ascertain, is a major Atletico Madrid forum. Sufficed to say, feedback was pretty divisive.
Twenty-seven pages. Twenty-seven pages of Atletico Madrid fans in uproar over the shirt. My shirt. The shirt that I casually shat out in a couple of bored minutes. I didn’t even like it.
This was all a year ago. However, I found out today that, not only did the Spanish press believe my shirt to be the real deal, but so did a company in Asia that make knock-off replica shirts. To get their dodgy merchandise out at the same time as the official kit launch, they sometimes have to go ahead with manufacturing before the design is confirmed...
I think you know now where this is going.
So without further ado, I present to you, the physical manifestation of a fake Atletico Madrid shirt design that I threw together in about ten bored minutes.
I can't stop laughing.
