Coventry Football Shirt

Submitted by: footballshirtculture - Added to website: 7th June 2007

Coventry legend

The ban on sponsored shirts in televised matches was not lifted until the 1983-84 season. Before then the Coventry chairman Jimmy Hill tried in vain to change their name to "Coventry Talbot" as part of a partnership with the Coventry-based car makers.

He did, however, succeed in sending them out in kits on which the Talbot logo was integral to the design .

So integral in fact that they had to wear a totally different strip whenever the cameras were present.

Coventry City thought they were on a winner when they introduced a kit that incorporated the logo of the Talbot car manufacturing company into the design but the TV companies boycotted them until they introduced an alternate strip for televised games.

In 1983 the TV companies finally gave way and allowed sponsored shirts to be broadcast: immediately the value of a sponsorship deal with a club that would feature regularly on Match of the Day or the equivalent ITV programmes went through the roof. At the time, Football League regulations restricted the size of logos to a maximum of 81square centimeters (32 square inches) but for televised games they had to be half this size.