All in all, I don’t think there’s a better time period to live in than right now. Back in the olden days, you had to go to the toilet outside and the only thing there was to do for fun of an evening was die of dysentery.
Everything was coloured grey and covered in soot, and your clothes would also be grey and covered in soot because no one had invented the washing machine. If you had any colour in your clothes then it meant you were rich, and the richest people of all would wear the rarest, most expensive colour of all – purple.
That’s because purple dye was extremely hard to source, coming from a mollusc found in only one region of the entire world at the time. And because it took 9000 of those molluscs to produce just one gram of that dye, only emperors, kings and queens could afford to use it, meaning it became synonymous with royalty. It makes sense then that Liverpool would choose purple as the colour for their away kit on their ascent to becoming footballing royalty once again.
It’s not the first time Liverpool have worn purple, however (that honour goes to Warrior’s 2012 third kit, stay tuned for that), but this is the first time that the shade was so vivid. New Balance officially named it ‘Deep Violet’, and then decided to liven it up even more by making the accents ‘Alpha Orange’. This, again, is a colour seen once before in Liverpool’s kit history, on the previous years third strip.
The bold colour choices are certainly memorable. And they have to be, as the shirt was only worn three times in competition – twice in the Premier League, and once in the Champions League, Liverpool preferring to wear red or their throwback grey kits while on the road. The results for this purple kit are perfectly balanced too – one win, one loss, one draw. Mo Salah won the golden boot that season, and added one goal to his tally while wearing it against Southampton, the talismanic shirt breaking his six match goal drought.
Ribena enthusiast James Milner also bagged a goal against Arsenal while looking like his favourite drink, earning Liverpool a vital point to put them back at the top of the Premier League table. However, just 3 days later, Milner wore the kit when he captained Liverpool to 2-0 loss to Red Star Belgrade in the Champions League group stage. Don’t worry though, we know how that turned out in the end.
The hi-vis orange highlights on the shirt may have come in handy too, as all three games where it was used were played in the evening under floodlights.
The 18/19 set of kits were New Balances most successful for Liverpool at the time, and even now on the secondary market this shirt usually sells very quickly and can command strong money.
Maybe purple is still valuable after all. Either that or the Queen is buying them.
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