Beer-tastic World Cup Jerseys: Group F

By Nick Sindt

Here we are! Under just three days to the greatest sporting spectacle the world has ever seen. No... not the monster truck rally at your local convention center. The World Cup! The pageantry, the globe's greatest teams and players, the crazed and delusional fans (looking at you, England).

But what about the team's jerseys? Every four years, and sometimes even more frequently, the National teams of nearly every country roll out new threads for materialistic consumers to salivate over and spend their hard earned dollars, yen, Euros, etc on.

How will you ever sort through all of them to decide which jersey you'll treasure for the next month?

Worry no more! The Free Beer Movement's Nick Sindt is going to walk you through all 32 teams' home and away jerseys and rate them based on (what else?) beer!

Previous Groups:
Group A
Group B
Group C
Group D
Group E

Here’s how the ratings will work; I’ll be ranking each kit on its design/uniqueness and purchasability (from a home fan’s standpoint) and the rankings will of course be done in beers as follows:

John Smith’s Extra Smooth = An Excellent design that deserves to be toasted with a fine beer; you don’t need to pound these back to look at it, but it’s beer and it’s the World Cup so we know you’re going to.

Summit [Insert Local Brewery Name Here] Extra Pale Ale = A solid design though it may not satisfy everyone’s pallets. You’ll only need two or three of these excellent brews before you lose your inhibitions and purchase the kit online in the middle of the night.

Miller Lite = A shallow and pedantic effort by one of the “big names” in the world, but it’s still an average beer/your national team’s kit so you can’t hate it, right?

Coors Lite = Thankfully Coors tastes and goes down like water because you’ll be drinking a lot of it to drown out the abomination that is this iteration of your team’s kit.

Bartles & Jaymes = Shennaigannery! Travashammockery! This kit is such an abomination you’d rather punish your liver, taste buds, and stomach with a wine cooler.
Since this World Cup is in South Africa we’ll start with the hosts.

Italy Home --------------------------Italy Away

Thankfully Puma will not be giving Italy one of their African template shirts with the country specific emblem sublimated on the shoulder. I’m having a difficult time trying to figure out what cultural icon they would put; maybe the leaning tower, the roman coliseum, a fat mafia guy, a big plate of spaghetti? There are just too many choices…As usual the home shirt for the Italians is a royal/azzuri blue color, but this year the collar has been spiffed up with a special 5-point opening with the green, white, and red lining of the Italian flag. And, there’s something else that I can’t quite put my finger on, is it the white trim on the shoulders, the newly added start to the crest, the FIFA cold crest for being the current World Cup holders, or could it be the weird Russel-Crowe-Gladiator-chiseled-chest pattern sublimated on the front of the shirt? What the hell is that about? It’s not like this is an overweight Sunday-league team running around trying to look fitter than they are, these are professional, and arrogant, athletes, did we really need to add something to make them appear more arrogant?

Home Design = Bartles & Jaymes
Home Uniqueness = Summit EPA
Home Purchasability = Bartles & Jaymes

The away kit wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the god-awful Italian flag collar that appears when “popped,” which we know every Giuseppe Rossi wannabe in New Jersey will be sporting this summer making the jersey even less tolerable.

Away Design = Miller Lite
Away Uniqueness = Miller Lite
Away Purchasability = Coors Lite

Paraguay Home -------------------- Paraguay Away

Paraguay’s home shirt sticks with the traditional red and white vertical stripes, but adidas changed it up a bit thicker stripes. Not a bad effort, but not terribly awesome either.

Home Design = Miller Lite
Home Uniqueness = Miller Lite
Home Purchasability = Miller Lite

Even though their away kit is a lame adidas template, no one else at the cup (save North Korea since we don’t know what they’re going to be wearing) will be wearing them. The white with blue and red trim is a decent looking shirt.

Away Design = Miller Lite
Away Uniqueness = Summit EPA
Away Purchasability = Summit EPA

New Zealand Home-------------------------- New Zealand Away

Though extremely plain, there’s a subtle dignity to the All Whites wearing all white, though the grass stains are going to be a bitch. Something tells me that the NZ National Team also doesn't fill these things quite as well as their rugby counterparts, the All Blacks, do.

Home Design = Coors Lite
Home Uniqueness = Coors Lite
Home Purchasability = Miller Lite

Though the away shirt is the complete inverse of the home kit, an all black jersey/kit is pretty solid. The difficulty in wearing an all-black kit is that you're supposed to be the big, bad talented team from the Disney movies that walks over all of their opponents. I'm thinking that this isn't how it's going to pan out for the Kiwis.

Away Design = Coors Lite
Away Uniqueness = Coors Lite
Away Purchasability = Summit EPA

Slovakia Home --------------------------------- Slovakia Away

The guys and gals at adidas must’ve gotten tired by the time Slovakia’s turn for kit design. Their home and away offerings are almost as sad as what you’ll find on the local youth club teams. Poor, poor, poor effort by adidas.

Home and Away Design = Bartles & Jaymes
Home and Away Uniqueness = Bartles & Jaymes
Home and Away Purchasability = Bartles & Jaymes


Support the Movement. Get the Free Beer Movement T-Shirt. Only from Objectivo.com