First Time Ever(?): Germany Players Wear Different Types of Black Socks

Oct 14, 2019

by Pat

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If you watched Germany's Euro qualifier last night, you might well have witnessed a world premiere. According to several kit experts, it was the first time for Germany to wear a white-white-black combination. This was done in order to avoid the kit clashing with Estonia's blue-black-white.

But this was not the only unusual thing about Germany's kit last night. As pointed out by our follower Christoph, apparently not all black socks were created equal. While most of the team wore black-white Adidas teamwear socks, a few players had a different variant, with DFB written across the front and the Adidas logo on the calf.

Among the players to don the more 'proper' socks are Emre Can, Kai Havertz and Luca Waldschmidt. Either Adidas did not have enough of the black socks available or there's another weird reason for this inconsistency. Christoph has one possible explanation:

Might be that Adidas only produced sleeve socks with DFB in black and UEFA did only allow black player socks underneath. Can and Havertz have them from there clubs, both black socks. Everyone else had so switch to a template that had the socks included.

Sounds unlikely? Maybe, but at this point we shouldn't put anything past UEFA so quickly.

In case you don't remember, it's not unprecedented that a major Adidas team has to resort to using teamwear shorts and / or socks: in order to avoid a clash with Leipzig in the German cup final last season, Bayern Munich switched to alternative white shorts - those being directly from the teamwear catalog and free of any club logos.