Meet the Leeds United fan who ended up designing this season's kit

Ed has run Acid FC (www.acidfc.com), a Leeds-based design studio, since 2018. Prior to that he co-founded Milltag, where one of his biggest projects was designing the inaugural Tour de Yorkshire official jersey in 2015. “It was great fun and doing the Tour de Yorkshire kit was the big one and that got me on the map in Yorkshire,” he says, speaking from his home in Roundhay.

He started Acid FC as an Instagram account to showcase his football-related work, mostly graphics and posters. “I enjoyed the cycling work but football stuff was a bit of an itch that I had to scratch.”, Then one day he got a phone call from France on his mobile. “I thought it was a wrong number but I took the call and it was David Bellion, who used to play for Manchester United and Sunderland.”

The former striker was working as brand manager and creative director at Red Star, a Paris-based club in the third tier of French football. He had been impressed by Ed’s Instagram posts and asked him if he fancied designing the club’s kits. “This was music to my ears. That was the dream job – getting players wearing the kit I designed,” says Ed, who jumped at the opportunity.

He went off and researched Red Star’s history. He found out that they were based in an area of Paris famous for its antique market so he designed a style similar to heritage wallpaper featuring 11 different scenes charting the club’s past .

The kits have become cult classics and Adidas was so impressed that its head of football told Ed it would include the designs in its brand book for years to come. “I said to him, ‘I’m a Leeds United fan so if there’s ever anything I can do with the Leeds kits, I’d love to help out.’”

He didn’t think anything of it until a year later Adidas contacted him out of the blue and asked if he had some ideas for a new Leeds United kit. Ed went away and settled on the peacock concept, with feathers providing a repeat pattern on the shirt and a peacock emblem on the nape of the neck. This harked back to Leeds’s old nickname – Elland Road was originally called the Old Peacock Ground – and the fact the bird appeared on the club’s badge back in the 1980s.

It turned out the club had been thinking along similar lines. “I’ll never forget it. It was like ‘right, you’ve got the gig,’” he says. “It was one of those sliding doors moments. Were the planets aligned? I don’t know.”

The former Leeds Grammar School pupil was brought in to work with Adidas for about three months to hone the designs for the 2023-24 season. Peacock iconography runs across the club’s three kits, including the iconic white strip and the loud pink and yellow third kit. “I wanted a third kit so that if you saw someone on the beach wearing it on holiday, you instantly knew they were a Leeds fan.”

For Ed, designing the kits was a dream come true, but also a huge responsibility. “There’s a lot of emotions because whilst a lot of your market is an older age group, you’re also talking to a load of kids for whom this is their first kit. I remember my first kit and the meanings it has and you have to balance that. I think it’s one of the hardest jobs to do in fashion design because you’re dealing with something that’s so important to so many people.”

The reaction from most fans has been really positive, helped by the team performing well on the pitch. “You’re effectively dressing a city, especially Leeds which has only one [football] team, and I’m not blasé about it. When I see them on the street, I still have to pinch myself,” he says.

Fans have a deep connection to sports kits, one that’s wrapped up in nostalgia, and you mess around with this at your peril, as Nike found out recently when it altered the St George’s Cross to include purple and blue horizontal stripes in a “playful update” to the England shirt ahead of Euro 2024. It upset some fans and even prompted Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to say the flag should not be “messed with”.

It shows the passion, and loyalty, fans have for their club or country. “Once you’ve made that choice you never change. No other brand has that kind of loyalty,” says Ed.

It perhaps explains why fashion and football have become increasingly close bedfellows in recent years on the back of the resurgence of retro tops. “It feels like football is in the fashion realm more than ever before and I think the reason for that is it’s become part of the whole cultural industry,” adds Ed.

Fashion houses like Balenciaga have designed kits in recent years and we are seeing a growing number of collaborations between fashion labels and football clubs, including Off White working with AC Milan and Dsquared2 partnering with Manchester City.

It’s not just fashion either. When you see global superstars like the Kardashians, Drake and Justin Bieber wearing football tops, it only adds to their cachet, while football stars like David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo have even become style icons themselves. “The players are superstars off the pitch and they’ve become influencers. I wouldn’t have taken my fashion sense off footballers in the 80s and 90s, but I find it fascinating the way we can link fashion, music, art and football, because this wasn’t around when I was a kid,” says Ed.

He's intrigued at the way football, fashion and art can be used to tell more interesting stories – something he has done using designs by William Morris, the fabled artist and leader of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. Ed sought permission from the William Morris Gallery in London to use its patterns to create a kit for Walthamstow FC, the non-league football club not far from the gallery which used to be Morris’s home.

The kits were produced by Admiral, and Stella Creasy, Labour’s Walthamstow MP, even wore the club’s tracksuit jacket, featuring a William Morris pattern with flowers, in the House of Commons.

Ed believes football kits can tell a story about the history and heritage of a particular place and it’s something he wants to explore in the future, not only creating football strips but “cool” streetwear and day-to-day clothing. He wants Acid FC to have its own brand and is in the process of looking for more investment. “One of the products we’re hoping to launch is upcycled work jackets that I’ve repurposed and embroidered. So I’m always thinking about how we can reuse things,” he says.

This taps into the growing desire to make fashion sustainable. “If you can get people excited about having something, then they’re going to want to keep it and cherish it, and that’s part of the process of making it more sustainable.” And telling a good story can help achieve this. “Football merchandise and sports merchandise haven’t really changed in my lifetime…there’s still a lot of teddy bears and golf tees and that’s what I’d like to see change.”