Or some would say.

It came up in conversation on the WhatsApp today: Bristol Rovers, the footballing team that I call my “family”, accidentally and then officially released their new home kit the other day. Now, the concept of creating a new home and away kit every season has forever been annoying to me: much like Football Manager game releases, you are simply tarting up (that is, for foreign readers, to dress up something i.e., like you would with a prostitute to make her attractive – not a practice I would encourage, but I digress for now) something that is essentially no different to the last 14 versions of it… and yet I always want the new shade of purple and the switching of this button from left to mid-left centre instead to the point of paying £30 for the privilege – just like I did last year, and the year before, and the year before, etc. So imagine how that relates to Bristol Rovers and their kits: we play in Quartered Blue and White shirts. For reference, this was last years kit:

Which you can compare to the year before that (2024/2025):

And compare that to the year before (2023/2024)

As you can see, aside from patterns, collars and shades of blue there isn’t too much you can do with Quartered shirts.

Unless you deviate from that and throw in some creativity/chaos, as our 1996/1997 Season’s offering shows…

We call that the “Tesco Bag”. Aside from the RED sponsor (Bristol City, our arch rivals, play in red), this just shows that as stupid as changing something every year just to change it might seem, changing something for this monstrosity is also stupid. If you can’t say anything nice, and all of that…

So we release this years kit, albeit in a non-conventional way: the club accidentally released the promo video on YouTube without any context, name or information alongside it – we just had to assume this was an accident release, but would probably be the kit we wear next season. Soon enough the club made the announcement official (not before making the announcement that PUMA would become our new “technical kit partner” – more on that later) and off to the races we go!

But that choice of word has crept up a lot – “Primary Kit”. To most football fans it is simply “home kit” and “away kit” – maybe a “third kit”, if you support one of them fancy teams abroad or in them thar Premier Leagues. Home Kit is pretty self explanatory, no? The kit we wear at home. Away kit is the kit we wear away from home. Seems like a simple concept.

But the club keep referring to the kit as the “Primary Kit”. And it gets people jumping straight away to the question: is this “woke gone mad”? Are the club (or perhaps PUMA) aiming to utilise inclusive language to appeal to a different sector of the fanbase or those outside of it? Or is there other meaning behind it?

Believe me when I say – I’m a woke motherfucker. To paraphrase Homer Simpson here: I am one of the wokiest bunch of wokes that ever woked. It’s not hard to see why: I simply advocate for people to be free to live their lives and be happy and that in turns makes me a woke bastard, apparently. I’ll take it though – I’d rather be woke than be a sunburnt racist. Imagine hating black people whilst trying to achieve the same skin colour as burnt gammon and eggs? Couldn’t be me.

So the idea of changing language to be more inclusive? No skin off my nose. Go for it. But is this inclusive language being used? Some people may liken the idea straight away to talk of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policies (EDI, or DEI in some parts of the world), and immediately inundate you with talk of “woke gone mad” and “we want our country back” or “why can’t you call them *insert offensive word* anymore?”), but is it some nod to a woke ideology that comes to enforce neutral language onto people in order to coerce them into conformity? Is this big brother trying to control us through thought, speech and language and turn us into slaves?

I’m sure that may come someday anyway, but let’s look at the terms in use here: Home kit is for playing at home. But if we don’t play at home? We still use the kit. We only change the kit when we are playing a team with similar kit colours and the referee would struggle to work out who is who. In days gone by, a team may wear their home kit only at home or their away kit away, so sometimes that would be the case. But most times you only wear the away kit if there is a kit clash (no, not a crappy mobile app).

Now, Primary Kit might suggest you are trying to not say “home” so as to not offend the homeless. That is to say, those that are unhoused, or experiencing housing issues, or unsheltered person, or an individual without a stable home, a person experiencing homelessness, a housing-insecure individual…

The English Language is fun sometimes!

Needless to say – there are plenty of ways to express someone is homeless and the connotations that come with that may necessitate sometimes why a person would change the language that becomes associated with that. Is that the case here?

No.

I don’t think this is some concerted effort to speak to the woke crowd, like me. For one thing, without wishing to be cruel: of all the things to do on a Saturday afternoon I don’t think someone with a history of homelessness or housing problems would wish to waste £70 on a shirt and £20 on a ticket to listen to old, miserable bastards like me and the West Stand cry about pedestrian football and referees being shite. I imagine other than the 8,000 that average a game down the Memorial Stadium most people would want better for their lives. I’d like to think they would.

No, I don’t think it’s a New World Order attempt to silence our language. But it certainly is an attempt to reframe how we view football – or, rather: it’s language catching up with a modern era of football.

Because we go back to the idea of Home and Away: if teams aren’t wearing kits all the time at home or away, is it really home and away anymore? In this modern era of football being business and forgetting about the money that generates their ludicrous ideas (you know… us? The fans. You and me), home and away probably is one of those concepts that aren’t as relevant as they use to be.

It always makes me chuckle looking at American sports and seeing in the NFL how a game is referred to as “Denver AT Dallas”, to signify that Denver are playing at Dallas. In the UK, we are talking about the equivalent being Martin Tyler talking about “this game today, as we see Manchester United AT Liverpool”. Even that would start a war, led by TalkSport and The Sun, against anything remotely representing civil rights and equality (mostly because both entities lack the intelligence or cognitive abilities to differentiate between Superman and a glass of milk).

It’s when we look at how the Americans view sport that we can start to see why terms like “Primary Kit” begin to pop up. Do Americans have home kits? Indeed, do any of the NFL teams have similar colour of kits? The answer is yes – they do. The “home” team wear the kit they choose and it is the “away” team that has to change their kit. So, for example: The Packerteers of Green Bay like to wear Green (not surprisingly), so if they played the Jets of Noo Yawk (airplane references when talking about New York? Bad form, America. Too soon), who play in a lighter shade of green? Well, the Packerteers can tell the Jettisons to play in a different colour if they are performing the sporting ball venture within the Baying Green area.

It feels like a very American, corporate speak that whilst I make light and poke fun at these terms and the way in which language is applied to sporting matters in America, there will inevitably be someone around that will read those words, internalise them and then go into their meeting at NFL Headquarters and go “hey, guys! I’ve got some ideas!” proceeded by twenty minutes of the most insane drivel that a man can speak… and people will STILL go “hey, Derek’s got ideas!”. To rational, everyday people like you and I it seems insane. To the men and women in pursuit of new ways to make money it’s the untried method to clinch that new advertising deal.

Because unfortunately words lose meaning over time to us. I can make a smarky (smart mark – don’t worry, we’ll get there) remark about how THE TRUTH has lost it’s meaning, but that’s a conversation for another day. For now, we can say that words that we used to signify something doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. Literally, anyone? Talk to anyone resembling the stereotype of a “valley girl” or a “Californian” and you will inevitably be inundated with the word “literally” followed by no example of them “literally” doing the thing they said happened. Indeed, the word “literally” has gone from describing the thing exactly as stated to becoming the word to describe the “thing that’s kind of like, happened, but then I’m going to discuss for another half an hour about something else and return to how the thing I said literally happened never actually happened”.

So when we come to terms like “Primary Kit”, the logic is sound: as the kit that is “Primarily” used by the club, the fact whether we are playing home or away doesn’t actually relate to it anymore. Is “Home” an appropriate term? Perhaps “Primary” actually relate well to the cause these days. We do primarily play in Blue and White – are we being inefficient with the language by referring to home and away? Perhaps we need to be awaiting the release of the new Bristol Rovers “Tertiary” Kit?

Language and it’s meaning evolves. This is a natural order in life: Gay, for example, is vastly different to what it use to mean (have you been to Berlin on a Saturday night? Ain’t nothing Light-Hearted or Carefree about that place at night). It seems innocuous, but terms like “home” and “away”, “man of the match” and so-forth seemed inevitable to drift away within today’s American Corporate Speak Culture, as much as it may feel like the soul continues to be ripped out of football.

Because that is the unintended (or perhaps intentional, for some of these American business people looking to claw into a European market staunchly unmoved on things like “fan culture”, “community values” and “don’t charge out the ass for an shitty shirt that the sponsor washes out on in two light soaks”) consequence of these endeavours: it may seem like it’s nothing to change the idea of “home” and “away” to “primary” and “primary-adjacent”, but to many it’s an attack on the very identity of British football. One thing that comes with words, language and terminology is the idea of “tradition” – that by changing home and away, you are again attempting to take away the very of what football is within our culture.

It, again, may seem benign to many: changing home to primary is hardly the European Super League reformed, is it? But as we know from so many movements and times in history: it’s the culmination of the small details that create the horrifying big picture. Today it’s “primary kits” – tomorrow it’s just “They are now points instead of goals” and it steamrolls from there. The danger is, for whatever positive this may represent for modern football we cannot allow it to envelope and smother our culture. Today’s primary kit is tomorrow’s “FIFA® Budweiser® World Club Super League, brought to you by FOX Global!” anchored by Jack Jackison, Amanda Lookatme and Clint Dempsey squaring up to an intern screaming “DO YOU KNOW WHERE I’M FROM, DAWG!?!”.

A stretch, some would say. But it’s always the little things. At least, that is what mother says to father.

And we don’t discuss that outside of therapy.