I’m on record for favoring simplicity when it comes to my Chelsea shirts. “It’s Blue, what else matters?” as the memorable ad campaign (the one with the blue paint) said over a decade ago now.
But there’s keeping it simple in a classy way — as Nike themselves showed with that tremendous FA Cup 50th Anniversary shirt — and then there’s keeping it simple in a “who gives a [FUN]” way. If that adidas ad campaign in 2014 posited that Chelsea fans would buy a home shirt sight unseen just knowing that it was blue, Nike’s current third shirt figures that Chelsea fans would buy any old crap as long as it’s billed “a Chelsea shirt”.
Behold: some black polyester, straight out of the seconds pile at the factory floor, rejected as training shirts, even.
And where’s the World Champions badge going to go?