Love letter to AS Roma jersey

Waiting for the new issue of the Derby della Capitale, we asked to an AS Roma fan to tell us his favorite jerseys. 

#1  1982-83 Home shirt (Patrick)

I admit it, i’d rather put the 83-84’s shirt as first, but the truth is that no shirt can be better than the one worn by Tancredi-Nela-Maldera-Vierchowod-DiBartolomei-Falcao-Ancelotti-Prohaska-Conti-Chierico-Pruzzo, the first XI I’ve memorized without even watching it once. Simple, with red and yellow necklace and purple red shorts as the shirt. There are two elements that made me love this shirt: one is Agostino’s sweat after his last run around the pitch and the other are my mother’s tales about when she was taking my father (who supported Juventus) at the stadium. That Roma squad was the beginning that forged all Roma’s supporters in the next generations.

#2 1991-92 Home shirt (adidas)

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine Rizzitelli and Völler with a rock guitar and an adidas shirt with the original logo and you will get the 91-92 wonderful Roma shirt. Variating previous year’s theme, the adidas and Rome duo is just perfect. Those were years of magic nights in the Uefa Cup with Van Basten and Maradona’s co-protagonists. It was also the last year without Francesco Totti in the team.


#3 1936-37 Away shirt, but with slight variations also all the shirts from 1937 to 1942

Those were the last years of Fulvio Bernardini and the firsts of Amedeo Amadei. It was the fighting and sometimes winning Rome of Campo Testaccio. In those years, the away kit was touching for its simplicity and regality. A white shirt with double red and yellow stripe with Roma’s crest in the center. This style has been used for a decade, sometimes with little variations in shorts and socks. Besides its origins’ charme, this shirt also set the trend for all future away kits.

#4 (Ex aequo) 2014-15 & 2015-16 Away shirt (Nike)

The swoosh arrival at Rome has produced almost only good looking shirts (maybe except last year third kid, awful). The best results of this partnership are the traditionally white away kits. In 2014-15 season, the usual pure white of away shirts was decorated with a double red and yellow stripe, as a memory of some shirts from the sixties. In the next season, the stripes are gone, the white shorts became red and the white neck has some noble fancy seams. Basically, it’s a shirt worth of a fancy night more than a football game.

#5 2000-01 Home shirt (Kappa)

Third Scudetto shirt. Who can forget it? Minimalist, soft and yet enveloping with its elastic fabric. It didn’t have any mannerism but the necklace. But that year the squad was so good it would’ve even win in the pink bathrobe.

#6 1998-99 Home shirt (Diadora)

In Zeman’s second year as Roma’s head coach, the stylized wolf head came back on Giallorossi’s shirts, with a energetic stripe on the sleeves. Shorts returns white and socks black, like in the pioneers years. Besides, that was the first shirt of Totti as Roma’s captain and also the one he wore in the notorious “Vi ho purgato ancora” derby. It’s impossible not to love this shirt, especially for whom like me was in high school, wearing it during lessons. It was very hard to concentrate on the teacher with all those girls attending classes. 

#7 2001-02 Champions League shirt (Kappa)

Between the nineties and the new millennium we were watching the progressive enlargement of football shirts’ vertical stripes, drastically disappearing and changing the appearance of many historic kits (like 98-99 Barcelona’s). For Roma’s so waited return in the Champions League, Kappa seemed keen to follow the trend, maybe trying to give the Giallorossi a European dimension. To do so, they arranged the red and purple stripes vertically, alternating them and dividing the chest in two (with the Scudetto badge), with blue shorts. Both for nostalgia of that time and glory of the players who wore it, this is still considered one of the most unusual and noteworthy shirts. To be fair, players like Batistuta, Totti, Montella and Candela would’ve made any shirt look good.

Bonus track #1 2006-07 Home shirt (Diadora)

After three seasons of awful shirts, Diadora finally gets the job done with this kit. Without sponsor for the first time in many years, this shirt was very simple, almost low-profiled. It gone with Spalletti and his squad in one of its best seasons. But Inter’s battleship was too strong and Ronaldo and Rooney’s Manchester United too unreachable to dream of UCL semifinals. That team was good but unable to find awareness of its own strength. 

Bonus track #2 1978-79 Home shirt (adidas)

The 1978-79 was indeed an awful season for Roma, but thing were just about to change in the next season. But for this terrible year adidas forged a bizarre but colorful orange shirt, which only lasts for half season. But all the photos of young Di Bartolomei, Prezzo and Tancredi with veterans like De Sisti, Santarini, Paolo Conti and Spinosi are still impressed in Roma supporters’ memory for the shirt peculiarity and iconicity.