Chelsea FC (Home 2012/13)

Having covered all the teams in the knockout stages of this year’s Champions League, there was surely one name that was missing: Chelsea, the reigning champions who did not even make it to that stage. Well, at least they made it to the semi-finals of the Europa League where they were “relegated” to. So, we may as well look at the Europa League semi-finalists.

As usual, Chelsea has a plain blue home jersey. As in the previous season, Adidas delivered the shirt with a round collar, but refrained from any pattern or patches breaking the blue. However, instead of white as accent color, this time Chelsea uses gold for the three stripes, the Adidas logo, sleeve band, sponsor and even the white on the crest has been replaced by gold. In my opinion, the latter is taking things a bit too far. On one side (unlike Bayern Munich‘s use of gold in their current jersey) the choice seems to be justified – after all Chelsea are still reigning champions of Europe (I won’t comment on how they got there and what happened afterward, but I will have to say this: that penalty shootout win against Bayern in the lion’s den somehow made me rediscover my former (=pre-Abramovitch) love for the Blues and gave me probably even higher feelings of schadenfreude than that infamous 1999 final). But, that jersey was presented a few days prior to the final, so it seems a bit preposterous to have used gold at that point.

The back of the collar has a thin golden stripe above which one can read the club’s initials, CFC. Otherwise the back is plain blue. I chose to display the golden numbers used in European play this season. It fits more nicely with the front. Again, he contrast may not be as high as could be, but at least the font is very nice. In the Premier League, Chelsea plays with white letters and numbers. This makes them stand out more, but also is somewhat in contradiction with the golden front.

If Chelsea would have opted for white instead of gold, this would have been the perfect Chelsea jersey. The gold does not bother me too much except for the crest. As said before this is taking things too far (imagine Bayern doing that).

My rating: 8/10 stars.

How do you rate this shirt?

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