Welcome, everyone to soccer 101.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and today we have a perfect episode for an audio medium. We're talking all things, crests and color schemes. Graham Rutherland, you had your big book out in front of us just before we started recording. How much reading have you been doing in preparation for this episode? Hello, Taylor Rockwell. Yes, I am very excited about this episode. We're talking about two of my favourite things in soccer today,

crests and kits. If we were also talking about John McGinn, it would be a clean sweep of my

favourite things in soccer. But we'll keep that for next week's Euro preview episodes on the main

feed. I have had my nose in this book here, which I showed you before we started recording.

It's football club badges tell the story of Britain, the beautiful history.

And it's a fantastic book.

I think you can find it on Amazon.

And I would very much recommend buying it if you can find it somewhere on the interweb.

It tells the story of badges.

It tells like the history of the UK.

Sterling Albion is in here because our badges of something interesting. I might mention that a little bit later on. But yeah, it's a very good book and I have been consulting it a lot over the last 24 hours. Is there a tower involved? A monument, Taylor. A monument. But yes, you're on the, you're on the, you're on the right tracks. It's right behind me. It's re-record. I probably should have gotten that one. Here's one of my favorite recurring bits of any episode trying to pull out a motion and sentiment from Graham. Ruffin. Graham, why are color schemes and crests one of your favorite things in football? I think it's because I don't just watch football. I'm not just into football for the mechanics of the game, right, in the 90 minutes. I like learning about places. Like a lot of my not, my general knowledge, as sad as this may seem, may seem, comes from soccer, right? Like geography, for example, I know where places are in Europe or around the world because of the football teams that play there. So I like learning about identities of clubs, histories of clubs, and a lot of that is reflected, or if you've got a good badge, again, we'll talk about that later on. If you've got a good badge, in some way that's reflected in the design, maybe not so much in the color combinations, but the two things are kind of one of the same, I guess.

So let's get into the history for a moment, because I too enjoy the historical aspect of

club's founding and how the crest and the color schemes kind of reflect that and then how

they've evolved over time. The obvious one, Graham to start, would be uniform color.

You need to be able to differentiate one team

from another. So you're going to wear colors that allow you to identify your teammates and to

identify the opponents. To my understanding, a lot of even present-day color schemes relate to the

availability of dye way back way. And it's a thing we've talked about before, but let's talk about it again. Yeah, absolutely. There are certain dyes that were more

expensive back in the day, and so you get a lot of black and white stripes. You look at teams like

Knott's County, who are one of the oldest clubs in England. And then even from Nott's County,

you get clubs like Juventus,

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