The Kit That Started It All
A five-year-old, his first kit, and how it shaped a lifetime of football.
I was five years old when I first pulled on the 1998-99 Everton Home Kit. I don’t remember the players who wore it, or the results from that season, or even much about the football itself. What i remember is the feeling of being given it - the sense that this wasn’t just a shirt but something important, something that made me feel part of a world that I was only just beginning to understand.
The kit was slightly too big for me, the way all football shirts were at that time. The colours, louder than anything in my wardrobe. The badge holding significance in a way I can only describe and understand now as an adult. I wore it everywhere: to football sessions, holidays, matchdays, parties, even when it didn’t make sense to. It became my first uniform long before I even knew what it meant to support a club.
Matchdays are my clearest memories. I can still picture myself walking up the Goodison Rd with my dad, wearing my shirt, holding my scarf - small, excited, taken in by the noise, and the crowds. As a kid growing up I always wanted to be like my dad, and wearing my shirt, waving my scarf, walking to the match with his mates, I was part of something much bigger than myself.
At five-years-old all I wanted to do was go the match with my dad, it had been nearly two years since I started going to Goodison Park, but I was now at an age I was able to understand it all. It was like I’d been invited into a secret world that only made sense once you stepped through the turnstiles.
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Even now, when I think back to those early trips to Goodison, the memory is inseparable from the shirt itself - I wasn’t just a going to the match, I was now a part of it, a part of the noise, the ritual, the highs and as an Evertonian the obligatory lows, but most importantly I was just going the match with my dad.
That’s the thing with the kits that shape our childhood: they’re not tied to tactics, or league tables, goals, tackles, trophies. They’re tied to identity. They’re the way football enters your life before you have the language for it. You aren’t sitting in the stands analysing anything. You just feel it. You just Absorb it. You wear it until it becomes a part of you.
When I look back now, that kit is less about the season it came from and more about the five-year-old who wore it. It’s a reminder of how football first got under my skin - not through results or heroes, but through colour, fabric, ritual and place.
The countless matches home and away and all the conversations we had on the journeys home.
It’s still the kit I think of first, not because of anything that happened on the pitch, but because of everything it came to mean off it. It marked the start of a twenty‑three‑year journey with my dad at my side — home and away, learning his rituals before slowly shaping our own. It was the shirt that made me feel like an Evertonian long before I had any real understanding of what that identity carried.
I still go to the match now, though not as often as I’d like. Work in my late twenties pulled me out of the rhythm of weekly football, the routine that had been second nature for so long. But whenever I make my way to the Hill Dickinson, Everton’s new dockside home, the ritual remains. The walk, the habits, the quiet superstitions — all the things built over two decades with my dad — they’re still there, even if it’s just me keeping them alive these days.
Thank you for being part of our community—see you in the next edition.
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This is a lovely reminder of how a single shirt can become a starting point for something special, rather than just an item of clothing.
What works so well is the way you treat the kit not as an aesthetic object, but as a trigger for memory, identity, belonging. We all have that first shirt that quietly shifts us from casual observer to something more invested. It’s rarely about the design alone, it’s about timing, context, who we were when we wore it.
Pieces like this matter because they document the emotional entry points into fandom, not just the big historical moments. That’s often where the real story begins.
Great callback! Thanks for that