In the famous year of 1966, Adidas partnered with Le Coq Sportif. The partnership was based on complementary strengths.
Le Coq Sportif, the textile specialist introduced the German company to the world of French athletes, while brought its Leather skills and International presence to the table.
It was the best of both worlds.....
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The past few days a lot of Manchester city fans visited this site to take a look at the 1969 F.A. Cup Final shirt which was sold at Bonhams auction house. This caused some problems to our site, because this page contained more than 60 pictures, and we had to remove the article. Anyway, here is your all-time classic.
Lot No: 287
1969 F.A. Cup Final shirt
Official Manchester City players shirt, made for the final, versus Leicester City. Manchester City Crest embroidered "M.C.F.C. Wembley 1969". Spare shirt not issued.
Estimate: £200 - 300
Footnote:
We are informed that the players were only issued with one shirt, worn for the match. A very limited number of "spares" were also made, but were never available to the public.
Read more: 1969 F.A. Cup Final Official Manchester City players shirt
The Caberlotto family founded their footwear enterprise in Montebelluna in 1939. In June 1973, following the sale of the Caber ski-boot brand to Spalding, the Caberlotto brothers launched Lotto as a dedicated sports-footwear label. Lotto’s first products were tennis shoes, soon followed by models for basketball, volleyball, athletics and football, with apparel arriving shortly after.
Montebelluna matters because it is a specialist industrial district for sports footwear. Brands across the industry have celebrated the craft base that developed there, and Lotto’s registered corporate address remains close by, at Via Montebelluna 5 to 7 in Trevignano near Treviso. This location anchors the company in the area that has supplied skilled shoemaking for decades.
Through the late 1970s and 1980s, Lotto expanded beyond tennis into football. Players and clubs helped shape product development, and the brand increased its international distribution. By the early 1990s Lotto appeared on major club and national team shirts and boots, and the double diamond became a familiar mark on European pitches. That trajectory is consistent with the brand’s own historical record and with independent retrospectives that outline Montebelluna’s role in European bootmaking.
By the end of the 1980s Lotto had taken a deliberate step from courts to pitches. The brand first built credibility through boots worn in Serie A, then secured the kind of shirt deals that put its double-diamond where the cameras could see it.
The Rossoneri of Capello’s era, serial Scudetto winners, European champions, and global television magnets, spent a core five-year run in Lotto. Those shirts travelled everywhere the club did: Serie A, the Champions League, the Supercoppa. It anchored Lotto’s visibility well beyond Italy.
Oranje’s mid-90s kits were Lotto’s calling card at international level, a period that fixed the brand in the memories of a generation who watched the World Cup from America’s packed stadiums and then the Euros in England two summers later.
Croatia’s first World Cup was a phenomenon—new flag, new federation, and a run to the semi-final. The checkerboard slanted diagonally on a Lotto template that became instantly recognisable as Davor Šuker finished top scorer. For many collectors, that is the definitive Lotto international shirt.
Moving into the 2000s, Lotto returned to centre stage with Juventus. Those were the Fastweb years, with Del Piero, Trezeguet and Nedvěd carrying the badge. Juve in Lotto meant relentless broadcast time across Serie A and Europe.
Lotto were also a steady presence across other Italian clubs, including Fiorentina, Udinese, Bari, Genoa, Chievo and Torino, cycling in and out as supplier through the 1990s and 2000s. Abroad, the brand turned up with Real Zaragoza and others in Spain, and later in Eastern Europe where it supplied emerging national sides such as Ukraine and Serbia and Montenegro in the mid-2000s. The message was consistent: a strong Italian base and tactical expansion wherever a partnership could carry the double-diamond onto prime-time pitches.
Endorsements mattered long before social media did, and Lotto kept a deep roster of Serie A and international professionals in its footwear. In the mid to late 1990s, forwards and playmakers in Italy, the positions that draw the camera, were frequent Lotto wearers.
Two Lotto lines, in particular, deserve their place in boot history.
A classic leather silo that sat comfortably beside the great black-and-white boots of the 1990s. The Stadio’s reputation was simple: supple leather, reliable last, pro-room trust. If you played in Italy, you knew someone who swore by them.
The world’s first commercially available laceless football boot. The Zhero Gravity pre-dated the modern knit, collar and vacuum-fit revolution by years. Elasticised, tensioned construction pulled the upper tight across the midfoot and struck clean without laces. For a time it was the most futuristic thing on a pitch and proved Lotto could still surprise a market dominated by bigger budgets.
Beyond those icons, Lotto iterated through technologies that became house codes: soft K-leathers and calf leathers on heritage lines; lightweight synthetic microfibres on speed boots; and outsole plates tuned to Italian pitch conditions. The brand’s tooling often had a slightly different feel to German and American rivals, reflecting Montebelluna’s craft lineage.
A major inflection point came in June 1999, when a group of local investors led by Andrea Tomat took over and renamed the company Lotto Sport Italia. Under Tomat, the business refocused on football and tennis, outsourced most production to Asia, established a logistics hub in Hong Kong, and stepped up product R&D.
The ownership structure changed again on 18 August 2021, when WHP Global acquired the global Lotto trademarks and entered a long-term partnership with Lotto Sport Italia. The agreement kept Lotto Sport Italia operating the brand in Italy, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, while WHP expanded Lotto globally through licensing.
Licensing has since advanced in key growth markets. On 19 April 2024, Reuters reported that Agilitas Sports had obtained exclusive rights to design, manufacture and distribute Lotto products in India and Australia, with a roadmap to South Africa and product launches scheduled from early 2025.
If you collect shirts or care about the history of boots, Lotto is one of the through-lines that connect the analogue 1980s to the modern, licensed, social-media era. That is Lotto’s real story in football: decades of visibility earned through smart placements, a boot portfolio pros trusted, and just enough audacity to shake the market when it felt safe.
The service model looks coherent. A central store simplifies consumer access, while UK teamwear and India and Australia licensing broaden reach at lower fixed cost. On-pitch visibility continues through selected club deals. In Italy, AC Monza and Lotto unveiled their 2024–25 kits on 8 August 2024, and the relationship continues into 2025–26. In England, AFC Wimbledon announced a new three-year technical partnership with Lotto on 14 April 2025, unveiling the first set of kits on 27 June 2025. The next phase would likely be selective additions to the European club roster to lift broadcast visibility.
Chris Maddox reckons that in a season that is expected to see an exciting Premiership challenge from Liverpool this year - it’s sportswear giant Adidas’ purchase of Reebok which is causing a fair bit of fuss too…
There’s something about having the logo of a brand like Adidas sitting proudly on your clubs shirt. It conjures up a feeling of world-class football, an ethos of genuine European heritage – of winning.
Liverpool, as a club with the very strongest claim to sit along aside the very best in the highest echelons of the game, not so long ago had their kit produced by this very German sportswear company. It was a perfect love match, but it was soon to end prematurely.
Read more: Liverpool’s dedicated followers of fashion
On 14 March 1900 a young student named Floris Stempel sent a letter to a group of his friends, saying: "Hereby the undersigned invites you politely to grace us with your presence in one of the upper rooms of Café-Bar 'Oost-Indië', at number 2, Kalverstraat, on Sunday morning at 9 hours and 3 quarters, to discuss the establishment of an entirely new Football Club."
What Stempel wrote was, in fact, not completely true: the football club he wanted to establish was not "entirely new". Stempel had been chairman of a low-key football club some six years earlier, in early 1894, or possibly late 1893.
The players at the time referred to themselves as a 'club' because one of them, Han Dade, possessed his own leather football. Moreover, they officially rented a lawn in Willemspark, Amsterdam-South, to play their games. The name of the club: Ajax, after the ancient Greek warrior
The Fédération Française de Football (FFF) and adidas extended their partnership agreement in 2001 until 2010. Adidas and the French Federation have enjoyed an extremely successful partnership for well over 30 years.
The French team has worn the three stripes since 1972, when adidas first started the production of football-specific apparel. Since then, the FFF has celebrated a:
FIFA World Championship (1998), two UEFA European Championships (1984 and 2000) and three FIFA Confederations Cups (1985, 2001 and 2003).
Read more: Fédération Française de Football & Adidas
Life is looking wunderbar for a celebrated Tyneside company that makes replica football strips from yesteryear for nostalgic fans.
A blockbusting German film celebrating the country's World Cup win nearly half a century ago means big business for Team Valley-based TOFFS - (The Old Fashioned Football Shirt Company). When TOFFS negotiated a licence with the German football authorities to reproduce the white shirt worn by the squad that lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy, in Bern, Switzerland, in 1954, it seemed like little more than a routine piece of business for the company.
But that was to reckon without the German cinema sensation: Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern). And when the film set box office receipts rolling, phones (and tills) were also ringing loudly hundreds of miles away at TOFFS, where staff had to pull out the stops to ensure prompt shipment of almost 1,000 replica shirts to German fans over Christmas 2003 and New Year.
