When you see Juventus' black and white stripes, you think of Turin. And yet their story begins in an industrial city in England, home of Notts County. Their shirt is much more than a piece of clothing: it is a piece of the birth of football itself.

The oldest professional club in the world

Notts County celebrates 1862 as its founding year, based on informal matches its members played in a Nottingham park. A newspaper of the time describes a match on 25 November 1862, but some historians believe the report refers to another team. The club was formally organised in December 1864.

Thanks to this traditional date, Notts County is presented as the oldest professional football club in the world. In 1888 it was one of the 12 clubs that founded the Football League, the first organised league in history. The first season did not go well: they finished 11th and needed a vote to stay in the league.

Before the stripes: orange, black and chocolate

The first shirts looked nothing like today's. In the first recorded match, in 1865, the players simply wore blue caps, because the kits were not ready. In 1867 orange and black stripes appear for the first time, a colour the sources also call "amber".

From 1880 to 1890 the team wore a shirt that looks strange to modern eyes: half chocolate brown and half blue. The amber colour was never forgotten, returning decades later in the club badge.

1890 and the "Magpies"

In 1890 Notts County switched to black and white stripes, mainly to avoid being confused with their opponents. According to kit historians, the inspiration was the racing colours of the Duke of Portland's horses. The first stripes were very wide.

Before that, the team had the nickname "Lambs". With the new shirts, however, they quickly became the "Magpies", after the black and white bird. Apart from a brief return to chocolate and blue in 1934-35, the stripes stayed for good.

And they soon brought luck. In 1894 Notts County won the FA Cup, the first second-tier team to do so. How sacred the stripes are to the fans became clear in 2006, when the club withdrew 2,000 replica shirts because the manufacturer had put a white instead of a black stripe in the centre.

The box that travelled to Turin

In the early 20th century, Juventus wore pink shirts, sewn at home by the mother of the Canfari brothers. But the fabric did not last. Then Tom Gordon Savage, an Englishman from Nottingham living in Turin, asked a supplier in his home town to send something brighter.

A few weeks later a box arrived with black and white striped shirts, just like Notts County's. The players, tradition says, were disappointed at first. Juventus never took them off again, and that is where the nickname "Bianconeri" comes from.

The year remains an open question. Juventus officially gives 1903, but newer research in newspapers of the time places the change in December 1901. It is also not certain that the shirts came from the club itself rather than from a Nottingham sports shop.

2011: the "parent" opens the house

Juventus never forgot where its colours came from. When it opened its new ground, the Juventus Stadium, it invited Notts County for the opening friendly on 8 September 2011.

The match ended 1-1, with goals from Luca Toni for the Italians and Lee Hughes for the English side. A lower-league team held one of Europe's biggest clubs to a draw at its own celebration. That same season, for the club's 150th anniversary, Notts County released a commemorative shirt that revived the wide stripes of 1890.

A shirt worth keeping

The Notts County shirt is a collector's item with a story few clubs can tell. It links the football of Victorian England with the modern Serie A and is a reminder of how small the football world really is.

Whether you wear it in the stands or hang it in a frame, it carries the story of the oldest professional club in the world.

See our collectible jerseys at sportarena.gr.

Photo: Meadow Lane stadium in Nottingham – Bryn Holmes, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.