Having just invested in a large number of these shirts for my 5 a side football team I was pleased to see this product available for review. I would add that I have only worn my shirt once in competitive action but on the whole I was impressed by the quality of the shirt even if, at £34.99, I was expecting good quality. We actually ordered these from an Italian website because I am not sure they are available in England yet but they were shipped within a couple of days which I was very happy with. Of course you are not allowed to advertise companies in reviews but if you cant get hold of this shirt then just put it into a search engine and you will get them.
The shirt is 100% polyester and of course comes in the traditional black and white vertical stripes. The sponsor for this season is Tamoil and there is quite a modest size badge in the centre of the shirt with a blue surround. The breast sections have the Nike emblem and 2 gold stars, both embroidered. In the centre, above the sponsor's badge is the club badge, which is also embroidered. One of the first things I noticed about the shirt were the two small sections at the bottom and side of the shirt which are yellow. This is my only real complaint about the design, I am not really sure the shirt needs it and it does smack of a small change to justify the launch of a new shirt. Having said that if you get the larger size as I did you can tuck the shirt in and you don't see the yellow sections, so its not the end of the world.
Juventus are the Italian champions and so there is a nice little touch that came with our shirts, an iron-on scudetto badge (scudetto being the name of their league title). I am not 100% convinced the badge will last the lifetime of the shirt but it does mean that our shirts will be identical to the ones worn by the players for the coming season, when they will play as the champions.
As many of the modern shirts are now made they have added the mesh section under the armpit to allow the shirt to breathe a little and reduce the amount of perspiration collected in the material…Nice! I have had other shirts with this feature and in fact the one on this top is very small and I really think this one is more of a gimmick than a real working part, but it certainly does not do any harm. The stitching throughout the shirt seem like very high quality and I do not expect to have an problems in this area. The final part of the design which is worth mentioning is the neck area. As you may expect the Italians do often lead the market for the design of football tops and the aesthetics of the polo neck design of the national team shirt in recent years have meant they have sold well. The only problem is design beauty and comfort do not always go together, the polo neck was simply not comfortable and fortunately they have not gone for a high neck line on this shirt. The have opted for the classic v-neck and in fact this was one of the reasons we chose the shirt. Its comfortable and also looks good, although I did have to cut out the large label at the back.
I have to say we all look really great on the pitch when we are wearing this kit and it certainly is eye catching. However the clothes do not make the man and the shirt did not bring us much luck last week. We lost the game but we lost in style and for once we could not blame the fact that we could not recognize our teammates. A beautiful shirt that I hope I will get years of wear from, and maybe a few more victories on the pitch.
