Anniversary shirts have become so common that it is easy to become numb to them. Change the badge, remove the sponsor, add a date inside the collar and call it heritage. We all know the drill by now.
Spezia have gone considerably further. For the club’s 120th anniversary, Kappa have produced a shirt based not on one famous season or a much-loved kit from the 1990s, but on the uncertain, slightly romantic beginnings of Spezia itself. The result is a quartered white and pale blue shirt with lace-up detailing, an old SFC crest and the sort of proportions that make it look as though it has been pulled from a photograph rather than a design meeting in 2026. Spezia will wear it against Gubbio on 10 October, exactly 120 years after the club traces its foundation to 1906. 
Then there is the cut. The four-quarter design is inspired by the sort of shirts worn around the turn of the 20th century, when football kits still looked closer to heavy athletic clothing than the technical jerseys we know now. The lace-up collar pushes it even further in that direction, while the old circular SFC crest strips the club identity back to something unusually simple.
But the best part of the story sits a little further back. Spezia’s official account of the shirt refers to founder Hermann Hurni and a story preserved through an interview with his daughter. She recalled that Hurni had brought a set of Crystal Palace shirts back from England after spending time with the club’s reserve side. Palace were wearing white and blue before 1905, with contemporary descriptions suggesting the blue was closer to a pale sky blue than the deeper shades we might associate with the club now.
That detail gives the shirt something anniversary kits often lack: ambiguity.
Nobody is pretending there is a perfectly preserved 1906 Spezia shirt sitting in a museum somewhere waiting to be copied. Instead, the club have taken fragments of their own history, early colours, old photographs, stories passed down through family and the influence of English football on an Italian club in its infancy, and turned them into something that feels plausible.
It also fits with what Spezia and Kappa have been doing across the rest of the season. The 2026/27 home shirt returned to pinstripes as part of the same 120th-anniversary year, while the third kit takes its pattern from the Art Nouveau stained glass found across historic buildings in La Spezia. There is a clear attempt to make each shirt feel rooted in the city rather than simply decorated for the sake of it.
The anniversary shirt is easily the most convincing expression of that idea. It's also limited to 700 pieces, which inevitably makes the whole thing feel even more like an artefact than a regular replica. Spezia have previous here too. For their 110th anniversary in 2016, the club produced only 110 numbered commemorative shirts, each supplied with a historical image of the side that inspired the design.
There is always a risk with this kind of release that the history becomes more interesting than the shirt itself. Here, the opposite is true. The shirt would work even if you knew none of the story. The pale blue and white quarters are beautiful, the lace-up neck feels deliberate rather than theatrical, and the old crest looks far better than it has any right to.
Then you learn about the founder, the Crystal Palace connection and the club changing its colours in 1911, and suddenly the design becomes even better.
That's probably the difference between nostalgia and heritage. One simply reminds you of something old; the other tells you something you didn't know.
