Iconic kit: Boavista 2000/01 | OneFootball

How can you forget the shirt that made you believe in miracles? Boavista are facing the greatest threat to their centennial existence, but the memories of the good old days when they raised their game to challenge the ever-dominating Big Three will never be forgotten. Nor that iconic kit that opens the gates of eternity.

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It was Italian international goalkeeper Walter Zenga who famously told the press that his side, Inter, were favourites against the side he christened as the “funny shirts”. Funny or not, Zenga was not laughing later on as Boavista came out winners that night and overcame the reigning UEFA Cup champions in the 1991/92 edition, only to be later beaten by another Italian side, the future finalists Torino. The epithet stuck, though. Few sides in world football have embraced the checkered pattern. Although Moreirense also sport a similar one, at that time they were a fourth division side unknown to even most Portuguese supporters. Croatia wasn’t even a nation yet. So Boavista were one of a kind.

The club initially played in an all-black shirt with white shorts, a template revisited a couple of seasons ago in a testimonial kit that quickly sold out. They embraced the chequers in 1933 after a visit from their then chairman, Artur Valença, to France, where he was impressed by a side nobody really knows anything about. They have kept them ever since. The size of the black and white chequers may have changed, but the pattern remained a symbol of the distinctiveness of the football club.

It was later adapted to include the first club’s sponsors in the 1980s, Teresinha, the famous shoe store, drawn in red. Come the 1990s, the club moved between sponsors like Vila Flor and Mimosa to JCA and finally Montepio Geral, who would become their longstanding partner for the seasons to come. The association between the club’s shirt and the bank was part of the iconography of the golden era of Boavista, as they were worn in European competitions, in the 1998/99 season, where the side finished second and on their Champions League debut the following year.

Come 2000/01, everyone was expecting something special as Boavista had just moved from the Italian brand Diadora to sign with the world giant, Puma. Boavista had dressed in a mainly white shirt, with black chequers around it and the Montepio sponsorship in black printed in the middle for the previous season, but the Herzogenaurach brand moved to another style for the upcoming season.

They added a ton of yellow, which by then had become the main colour of the alternative kit, and also included the bank’s logo, a white bird, on top of the name. The collar and shoulders would be trimmed in a yellowish golden tone with the brand logo printed all over it, as well as in the collar in white. On the shirt, however, they would go for red, making it a shirt with four different colours, almost unprecedented in the club’s history. Yellow would be present in every single home shirt for the side over the following decade, while the Montepio liver bird would be an on-and-off protagonist over the years to come.

The shirt came accompanied with the usual black shorts, also with a yellow and white trim on the sides, and a white version that would be used sporadically. Socks remained black for most of the matches and eventually white, as well. The alternative kit would use the brand’s regular template, painted mainly in a strong yellowish tone, both in the shirt, shorts and socks, with black over the shoulders and sides of the shirt, and just the bank name printed in the middle. The third and rarely used alternative kit would be essentially white with just a chequered reflection on the left shoulder, and once again Montepio’s liver bird right in the middle alongside the bank’s name.

The main kit was used in almost every single match played in the league, as Boavista rarely clashed with any other side back then, and FIFA restrictions were far from being what we know today. They played in white shorts against Beira-Mar and Sporting, but only in the Lisbon fixture, funnily enough. Against Farense and Vitória SC, they used their alternative yellow shirt. It soon became a cult strip for every football fanatic. The same could be said for the main kit.

Despite different variations played out by Puma over the following years, no shirt better represented the power of the underdog in Portugal than that one. It wasn’t just the aesthetics which, in the case of Boavista, for its specialness, always make those shirts a must. It was for what it stood for. For the first time in decades a side could feel they were donning in a winning shirt without the badge being either Porto, Benfica or Sporting.

When Boavista visited the Porto’s Estádio das Antas, a week after they had been crowned champions by beating Desportivo de Aves at home, they proudly showed their city rivals the magnificence of their kit, one for the ages. For the following years the chequered shirt with the yellow trim and the Puma brand would also be made popular in Europe as Boavista returned to Champions League football, playing against some of the biggest sides in Europe such as Manchester United, Bayern Munich and Liverpool. Likewise, it was the kit during their iconic UEFA Cup campaign that only ended in the semi-finals due to a Henrik Larson goal that prevented Seville from hosting an all-Porto final, almost a decade before the Dragons faced Braga in Dublin for the same event.

Boavista may now be doomed to a long waiting period until they return to the elite, but walk the streets of Porto and you will still occasionally see someone dressed in that iconic 2000/01 kit, particularly if you move around the Bessa and Foz neighbourhoods where the club fanbase is stronger. For collectors, the shirt remains a must-have as the club’s marketing division at the turn of the century wasn’t quite ready for the outcome of the season and the popularity the shirt acquired, and not many were put on sale. At least not enough for its historical relevance.

It is a shirt that reminds us all that Portuguese football is so much more than the usual Big Three all-conquering sides and their traditional colours.