Hitachi, the V-neck and King Kenny

From the moment I decided to go back and start collecting older shirts, this was the one I wanted. Liverpool, red, Umbro, the thick white V at the neck, Hitachi across the chest and the 7 on the back. For me it says King Kenny, and I have been enamoured with Kenny Dalglish for a very long time.

Liverpool signed him from Celtic in August 1977 for £440,000, a British record, to replace Kevin Keegan. He wore the V-neck from the start, and Liverpool kept it until 1982. At the end of his first season he scored the goal that won the European Cup at Wembley, in this shirt, before there was any writing on it.

The writing came in July 1979, with a £50,000 deal with Hitachi. "We are fighting for our existence," the chairman, John Smith, told the Daily Express. Liverpool were the first professional club in England to sign a shirt sponsor. They were not the first to wear one in the league, though. Everton, of all clubs, ran out in Hafnia shirts on 18 August 1979, three days before Liverpool's first league game.

Hardly anyone saw it. The BBC and ITV would not show matches with a sponsor on the shirt, and it was not allowed in the FA Cup or in Europe, so Liverpool kept a plain set for those days. That fits how I know it. Hitachi is before my time. What I saw growing up was this shirt without the sponsor, in grainy black-and-white footage on small TVs, on the BBC or ITV. The Hitachi version I saw more of later.

Sponsored or plain, Liverpool won the league in it in 1979–80 and 1981–82, the League Cup in 1981 and 1982, and the European Cup in Paris in 1981, against Real Madrid. For that final even the Umbro logos had to be covered, and the players did it with tape before kick-off. They were told it was a television rule. The Liverpool collector Simon Shakeshaft's account is that Horst Dassler of adidas had persuaded UEFA to ban makers' logos for the night.

I think of this as a sponsor we miss, and for me that is about nostalgia: the feeling of falling in love with football, your first memories, a time people like to think was simpler. Other names will do that for other people. Hitachi does it for me even though I came to it late. It is such a clean wordmark, and it looks iconic, because nostalgia does that to us.

I got mine over a decade ago, and I'm not going to say where. I had not expected the material to be as cool as it is. The fit is snug and it is outrageously cool, and the thick V collar is all-time. When I finally secured it I could not have been happier. A shirt like this would be beyond my budget for a single shirt now, so I'm glad I got it when I did.

I don't wear it often. It is far too precious. I did wear it in Paris in 2022, when I flew over for the Champions League final, to an event the night before the game. Liverpool were playing Real Madrid in a European Cup final in Paris, as they had in this shirt forty-one years earlier.

That V-neck is also the base of my favourite Liverpool shirt of all time. I'll come to that one another day, along with a few other legends who deserve their own turn.