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Matchworn by Steven Fortès 10.10..20 CPV🇨🇻 : GIN 🇬🇳 1-2
Manufacturer: Adidas
Source: Collector
THE TEAM
Despite being the fourth smallest member of the CAF, the “Tubarões Azuis” (Blue sharks), as Cape Verde’s national team is nicknamed, have attained some more than respectable achievements in African football. The small Portuguese-speaking island archipelago off the coast of Senegal has just over half a million inhabitants, thus making it difficult to assemble a competitive squad to hold against Africa’s big players. Yet, Cape Verde managed to qualify for the African Cup twice and even progressed to the quarter finals in 2013, where they lost 2-0 to the "black stars" of Ghana. Besides the respect of the football world, Cape Verde gained a ton of points in the FIFA ranking, making them the 27th best team in 2014.
The current squad of their national team solely consists of players playing for European or Arabic teams and as of February 2021, they still have a chance to repeat their past successes and advance to the group stages of the Africa Cup of Nations once again.
THE SHIRT
Let’s be honest, this shirt looks like a science experiment gone wrong…
While the team was renowned for their spectacular shirts, they decided to join Adidas a few years ago, just to be supplied with boring templates.
Like many nations did in recent years, Cape Verde decided to undergo a little facelift and change their federation logo. While other teams achieved terrible to decent results, the Cape Verdean federation did the only sensible thing: PUT A FRIGGIN’ SHARK ON THE BADGE!
When it came to the actual shirt, however, the decisions weren’t as reasonable:
The FA chose to go with the much-hated Adidas Condivo template. While the dark blue pattern does exude some maritime vibes, the neon stripes rather resemble a reflective west. To further support the “ocean” theme, the shirt is actually made of ocean plastic, so the six pack rings, that once strangled a sea turtle, or the plastic bags found in the stomach of a dolphin have been finally put to good use!
I really hated the first promo pictures of the shirt, as these featured their old sharkless badge and looked like a bad Photoshop, but luckily someone decided to slap the new badge on it, to at least somewhat save it.
Then, along came a (supposedly) colorblind federation member who thought it was a good idea to put yellow numbers on the shirt and make it an even bigger mess.
Well, let’s file this shirt under “interesting” or “unique” and hope that Cape Verde will one day return to getting the beautiful bespoke designs they had in the past.
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