My Match Worn Collection: Sampdoria

Posted on 25/05/21

My Match Worn Collection: Sampdoria

It’s funny how shirt collections sprawl isn’t it? When I started I was only interested in matchworn Hull City shirts, but then when I’d amassed a fair size collection it naturally became harder to find things I didn’t have so I considered another branch to the collection and that was Sampdoria player shirts. That’s happened several other times and I have a load of other stuff such as a ‘notable templates and technologies’ stash, and a small but respectable ‘international tournaments’ selection, but I tend to think of myself mostly as a collector of Hull City and Sampdoria.

I have 59 Samp player shirts, I guess that would be a much bigger number if there wasn’t the other collections competing for attention and finances, but I’m happy that it’s a solid foundation to build upon. I think that whatever you collect, you have to establish rules for the collection to give it focus. With Sampdoria, I decided to just stick to shirts, as beautiful and desirable as some jackets and training wear are, there’s only so much space to store this stuff. In terms of the years from and up to, it’s the Italia ’90/Football Italia years to present day, but that’s a flexible rule and if I can get hold of some of the 80’s NR and Kappa shirts I will, but understandably the most desirable items are in the hands of collectors in Italy. I don’t have any rules about the competitions shirts come from, and I have Samp shirts from Serie A, Coppa Italia and UEFA competition games.

I never went to Italy as a child or anything like that, but like many people of my age, I was captivated by Italian football when it appeared on TV when Gazza started playing for Lazio. Watching Hull City at a slowly crumbling Boothferry Park was my main experience of live football, so Serie A and it’s galaxy of stars in achingly modern stadia that I remembered from Italia ‘90 was a captivating spectacle that has stayed with me. Sampdoria’s ‘blucerchiata’ kit impressed me, and then seeing David Platt, a hero of England’s 1990 World Cup campaign, wearing that beautiful kit alongside Ruud Gullit, Roberto Mancini and Attilio Lombardo imprinted that club on me more than the big clubs of that era, Milan, Juventus and Inter. I had some Samp replicas over the years, but when I started going to Italy to see Sampdoria regularly from 2014 I guess it was inevitable that I’d start adding a new branch to the collection of matchworn shirts.

Because I tend to be a bit geeky about shirts and like to know everything there is to know, I befriended Luca Ghiglione, author of the book ‘La Maglia Piu Bella Del Mondo’ cataloguing the history of Sampdoria kits after I bought it on a trip to Genova, and that connected me to several shirt collectors who have been incredibly generous in helping me to build my collection.

I went to an away game in Frosinone with Luca and the lads he reglularly travels to away games with, it was not long after the introduction of the unpopular ‘tessera del tifoso’ a fan ID card that was met by an Ultras boycott of away games, meaning there weren’t many Samp fans there that day and at a later home game someone said to me ‘you’re the Englishman who went to Frosinone!’, which amused me. Maybe because it sounds like a dreadful Hugh Grant film. I was pleased to stand with Luca again when Samp played a friendly in Dublin against Manchester United. He also included some photographs of shirts I own in the second edition of his book that came out recently and that was a real honour.

I went to a game three years ago and some Samp fans who have become good friends arranged to have me accompany the bishop of Gubbio when he was given a tour of the stadium! Thanks to him I got to poke around the dressing rooms, drooling over the home shirts and messing around with the ref’s vanishing spray bottle!

David Platt has remained a Samp hero for me so when I was able to pick up the shirt he wore in the 1994 Coppa Italia final, it became the centrepiece of my collection. The first Samp matchworn I picked up though was a 2014/15 away shirt worn by Alfred Duncan at Cagliari, instead of a sponsor it had ‘Noi per Genova: Et tu?’ on the front, or ‘I’m for Genova, are you?’, a response to the city experiencing flash floods that caused significant damage in the area around the stadium.

 

If I had to pick a top 5 shirts from my collection…

 

Fabio Quagliarella - Sampdoria 2016-17 match worn kit

Fabio Quagliarella Sampdoria match worn

I’ve largely grown out of having heroes, the last vestige of that is me being a Fabio Quagliarella fanboy. He just seems to get better with age and is still scoring outrageous goals at 38. I have a few of his shirts but the 2016/17 home worn in a 3-2 win over Roma is the pick of the bunch.

 

Antonio Cassano - Sampdoria 2008-09 match worn kit

Cassano Sampdoria match worn

I said that Samp shirt collectors have been incredibly helpful to me in building my collection and a good example of that is collectors Claudio and Mattia sourcing me an Antonio Cassano home shirt from 2008/09. There’s a mad genius quality to Cassano that I admire, and although Samp lost the away game at Frosinone I mentioned, he was still the most influential player on the pitch, and by that point in his second spell with the club he was well into his 30s.

 

Jurgen Klinsmann - Sampdoria 1997-98 match worn kit

Jurgen Klinsmann Sampdoria match worn

He only played ten times for Sampdoria, but Jurgen Klinsmann is a proper legend of the game, World Cup winner, won the UEFA Cup with Inter, so to have one of his shirts, a 1997/98 home shirt made by Asics and sponsored by Daewoo, is very cool.

 

Roberto Mancini - Sampdoria 1994-95 match worn kit

Roberto Mancini - Sampdoria match worn

Asics made an error on an early batch of kits in 1994/95, the year the shirts had drawstrings on them. The order of the bands on a panel under the laces was wrong, with black over red instead of red over black, and it led to Asics making another batch to correct the problem. I have a number 10 red third shirt with the banding error, which means it was from earlier in the season, and I believe it was worn at Napoli by Roberto Mancini, who’s as legendary as they come at Sampdoria.

 

David Platt - Sampdoria 1994-95 match worn kit

David Platt Sampdoria match worn

I’ve already mentioned my favourite, David Platt’s shirt from the Coppa Italia final, which was the last time Samp won a major trophy. It’s an Asics shirt, in long sleeves. Samp were the first Italian club to wear the Japanese brand and their stuff was great, it’s a real shame they’ve faded from the kit supplying picture. I do have a 1991/92 Asics home shirt too, the only home shirt that has featured the Serie A Champion’s ‘scudetto’ and by all rights I should have that in my top 5, but I’ve gone with the shirts of players I really admire.

 

Words by Sampdoria Collector Les Motherby

Les is part of the excellent The Football Kit Podcast listen here!

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