Football teams wear their color uniforms at home and white uniforms at away games. This seems logical to me, you want to show your colors to your fans. But hockey and basketball do the opposite. Anyone know why this is?
I think it’s just a matter of tradition. It used to be mandated that you wear white at home and a different color on the road, but now teams in all sports wear dark colors. I hope the Mets don’t wear their black uniforms at Yankee Stadium.
Some football teams like to wear white at home because white is their “color”. Dallas and Washington in the NFL and LSU in college football prefer to wear white at home.
In pro football, I think the way it works is that the home team can decide whether it wants to wear the white jersey or the colored one. Most teams choose the colored one. I always assumed the Cowboys and the Dolphins chose the white ones because it was generally hotter there, and the white uniforms gave at least the illusion of less heat. But the Redskins example kind of screws up that theory. The fact that in basketball and baseball the home uniform is usually white might be for similar reasons. Hockey, I have no idea.
In many soccer leagues around the world, teams have one dominant jersey that they wear to every game unless the color is so similar to the other team’s that they can’t be readily distinguished, in which case they have a secondary jersey with a different color, which by the way is not always white either. So you might see a team with red uniforms playing against a team wearing blue, and neither team would wear white. In Major League Soccer’s championship game last week they were going to adopt this idea since one team did in fact wear red as their home jersey and the other blue. At the last minute, though, they had to switch back because the TV people told them that the guys in the production truck only had black and white monitors and they could only distinguish the players if one team wore white. (When I heard this I wondered why it made a difference as long as they could see where the ball was. The announcers can see the game in color and distinguish the players; who cares if the production guys can’t?)
On occasin hockey teams will wear dark jerseys at home. Like the Rangers with their “blueshirts.” Some hockey teams wear dark 3rd jerseys too.
I once heard the explanation for the Cowboys wearing white jerseys at home was because an earlier owner wanted the home fans to see the other team’s more colorful jerseys. I’m not sure what purpose that serves, and it could have been a different owner, but I thought it was Dallas.
In football, the home team does choose the jersey color. The Cowboys, for whatever reason, were the first team to choose white at home. This meant they rarely played in their blue uniforms. Someone noticed that their record was much worse when they wore blue than when they wore white (if the wore the blue their first couple of years, that was understandable). The Redskins were intense rivals of the Cowboys, so they started wearing white against the Cowboys at home, forcing Dallas to wear blue. Eventually, the Redskins went to white all the time (except when they play the Cowboys in Dallas, of course).
The Oakland Raiders wear black at home and away. They like the black = bad guys symbolism.
Really, the only rule is that each team has a light jersey and a dark jersey. It’s up to the home team which one they want to play in. The Rangers were a good example. A lot of teams end up wearing their ‘home’ jerseys on away games there.
I don’t think the Cowboys were the first to wear white at home. I have seen a photo from the 1950 NFL title game between Cleveland and Los Angeles, played in Cleveland, where Cleveland wore white jerseys. The Cowboys didn’t enter the league until 1960.
what about teams wearing colours that are completely different from their ‘official’ colours? For example, AS Roma of the Italian Premier soccer league have uniforms which typically are combinations of red, orange and white but then I saw them playing with dark blue jerseys? what gives?
You’ll see that a lot in soccer. For instance, Arsenal in England wear their red and white usually but their other jersey is yellow. Liverpool wears red but has a green jersey, too. I don’t know why they do it. I guess since they don’t wear them that often they don’t feel like they need a second jersey that uses their official colors.
Soccer teams do that because the tradition isn’t home and away jerseys, teams have a primary jersey that they wear any time that they can and if they play a team with a very similar uniform, they go to a radically different secondary jersey.
My guess is that soccer created this tradition before television. In the early days of sports on TV, the leagues needed one team to go with a light-colored uniform, otherwise the teams are indistinguishable on a black-and-white TV.
Tom Eaton is right about last week’s MLS championship game.
I’ve never heard of 3rd jerseys. When are they worn?
Not all hockey teams have 3rd jerseys. Some teams decide to have a 3rd jersey with a completely different design than their other jerseys. They’ll design them and then ask the league for approval to use them. If the league approves the design, then the team can start wearing them whenever they can. In the case of the Stars down here, back in the 98-99 season, their home jerseys were white with black and green stripes at the bottom. Their away jerseys were just the opposite. They introduced a 3rd jersey that is now thier away jersey. It was a completely different design, aside from the colors. They played so well while wearing them that season, they decided to use them as a permanant design. They don’t have a 3rd jersey this year.
Hope all that made sense. It’s still early here.
The real purpose of “third jersies” is to spur merchandise sales. The teams hope that fans will fork over cash to buy the third replica jersey on top of what they already paid for the first and second replica jersey, or that those who didn’t buy the first or second jersey will find the third jersey appealling and buy it instead. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with this.