The Good, The Bad, The WTF

Looks like an Aussie Rules logo

Third shirts are tricky. I understand that. You have to be visually distinct from your main shirt as well as your second shirt. As such, colors that are not often seen on the pitch otherwise are chosen for this task. So you are not likely to see solid reds, blues or even whites for the third shirt. Instead we find patterns, and in ugly colors.

Vitoria, in Brazil, are the power of the Bahia region. In the last 12 years, the Leão da Barra have won their state championship 10 times. After a mid-decade blip which saw them fall all the way to Brazil’s third division, Vitoria regained their usual status in the Brazilian Serie A in 2008.

2000 was one of those years when Vitoria won one of their 26 state championships. Unfortunately, some of the time their usual red or white kits clashed with other teams so they were forced to go to a garish third shirt. This is it:

Yellow! Lots and lots of yellow. Tie that in with some odd striping, in red and black, and you have one ugly shirt. It might be OK if the stripes were uniform, but they seem slapped on their willy-nilly. And why can’t the stripes on the sleeve go all the way around? That frustrates me to no end.

Another big problem I have here is with the sponsor logo. I understand that some area/place named Salvador is celebrating their 450th anniversary. And I understand that the white thing with a yellow top is most likely a famous sight in Salvador. What I do not understand is why, when depicting this famous tower, they decided to make it look like a baby’s formula bottle.

The nice thing about horrible third shirts is that, in the end, they are used rather rarely. Which is a good thing, especially when clubs trot out horrors like this onto the pitch. On the plus side, they didn’t make their fans shell out for multiple sponsors on their third shirts, so there is that.