There are plenty of away days where the football is comfortably the worst part. The Umbro Away Days collection understands this. Built around everything that happens before kick-off, AW26 takes the trains, platforms, waiting around and clothes supporters wear on the road and turns them into the basis for an entire range.
You get up at an unreasonable hour, meet your mates at the station, spend three hours travelling across the country and somehow find yourself in a pub at 10.30 in the morning. By three o’clock you’re watching your team go one down from a set piece. By five you’re back on the train wondering why you bother. A few weeks later, you can’t wait to do it all again.
It’s fertile ground for Umbro because football supporters have been influencing what people wear for decades. The collection looks particularly towards the travelling fans of the 1980s and 90s, when trips into Europe brought British supporters into contact with labels and styles they weren’t necessarily seeing back home.
Italy mattered enormously. Supporters travelled there for football and returned with something else entirely, helping create the strange relationship between football, sportswear and expensive clothes that would become synonymous with terrace culture.
Umbro, crucially, was already part of the furniture.
That history means the Double Diamond doesn’t need to work particularly hard to convince you it belongs here. Rather than simply digging out a few old designs and calling the collection retro, they’ve played around with familiar football shapes instead.
What makes the Umbro Away Days collection particularly interesting is how far some of those shapes have been pushed. The most obvious example is the brilliantly named Shersey, somewhere between a shirt and a jersey, which takes the basic shape of a football top and adds more formal shirting details. There’s also a pinstripe drill top inspired by 90s training gear, knitwear, tracksuits and a trench coat that owes something to the great tradition of managers standing on touchlines looking simultaneously freezing and furious.
It’s football clothing, but not necessarily clothing you’d wear to play football.
That distinction feels increasingly important. We’ve spent plenty of time on Showboat talking about the football shirt escaping the stadium, but the same thing has happened to almost everything around it. Drill tops, tracksuits and training shirts that were once completely ordinary pieces of club kit are now some of the most interesting things you can find on the vintage market.
Umbro know their way around that world better than most. Their archive is enormous, but their better recent releases haven’t simply been exercises in reproducing it. They’ve understood what made those clothes interesting in the first place and borrowed from them without making everyone look like they’re heading to a fancy dress night called Italia ’90.
Ultimately, the Umbro Away Days collection gets that balance pretty much right. More importantly, it understands the subject. An away day has never really been 90 minutes of football. It’s what you wear, where you meet, the train there, the pub you stumble across and the people you’re travelling with.
Sometimes you even get a decent game at the end of it.
The first Umbro AW26 Away Days drop arrived on 20 August, with the second following on 10 September.
If you're into more of the classics, you can shop our back catalogue of Umbro gems in the Showboat app or on our website here.
