I’m not really interested in football at all, but I was trying to design a football-style shirt. For some strange reason I found it incredibly hard to find photos of the backs of Premier League shirts, which I wanted to look at to try to copy the font. I tried Google, Google images, picking random clubs’ web sites – no luck.
But I did find an entire web site – in the Netherlands – devoted to the typography of football shirt numbers. Quite amazing. Well, if you’re a sad type-spotter like me, it is.
And the answer, in case you’re wondering, is that the English Premier Legaue use Optima Black squashed to about 70% normal width. And the Dutch footy-loving type-spotter is quite right – it looks awful.