Aston Villa were founded in 1874 and have played at Villa Park since 1897, but the shirts that survive in numbers start much later. The oldest items here are from 1974, the year Umbro became the first kit supplier allowed to put its logo on a Villa shirt; everything before that was made locally and almost never reaches the second-hand market. Of roughly 670 listings, 228 fall in the 2020s and 189 in the 2010s, against 114 from the 1990s, 107 from the 2000s, 25 from the 1980s and five from the 1970s.
The claret shirt with sky blue sleeves has been fixed since the club minuted the change from black jerseys on 8 November 1886, so the badge and the chest do the dating, not the colour. A star above the crest marks the 1982 European Cup; the badge was redrawn for 2007-08 and again for 2016-17. The front is the quickest clue of all: Villa’s first shirt sponsor was Davenports Breweries in 1982-83, and in 2008-09 and 2009-10 the club carried the charity Acorns Children’s Hospice instead of a paying sponsor, the first such deal in Premier League history. A shirt with Acorns on it can only be from those two seasons.
Home shirts number 214 and away shirts 124, but training wear reaches 105, with 36 track jackets, 37 polo shirts and tees, 30 player-issue items, 29 goalkeeper shirts, 25 third shirts and 17 match-issue shirts. The supplier names are markers in themselves: Castore on 87 items, Kappa on 38, Macron on 35, then Under Armour, Nike, adidas, Reebok and Umbro. Children’s sizes run throughout, and prices reach from six pounds to 480, with the middle near 54.
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