Tonga

Home; 2015/16

People with an interest in international kits maybe aware of Macron’s - and before that Adidas’ - deal with UEFA to supply some of the smaller European countries with kit through the UEFA Kit Assistance Scheme. Under the scheme, FAs who sign up are provided with free kit for their national teams at senior and u21 level, with the cost covered by UEFA. Their counterparts in Oceania went one further, and actually supplied kit to national teams under an OFC own-brand. I’m not sure of the exact nature of the deal, but I did find some remarks in OFC Insider Magazine (Issue 2, 2014) which suggests that member federations bought the kit from the OFC, and the money (in theory) would then reinvested back into the members. The OFC later rebranded their kits as ‘Pasifika’, using the same templates, but this now seems to be shut down and it does not appear the OFC is still supplying kits.

Being an own-brand effort, and one which I presume was aimed at keeping costs down, this shirt is of relatively poor quality. The crest is quite a thin transfer, though we all know that is a common problem at this end of the market. The quality control between batches does not appear to have been the best either, and different versions of the crest were seen with different sizes and slightly different design. Some of the player versions of this shirt had incredibly small crests, so small that they were hard to even make out. Lastly, Tonga’s home colours are red with white trim (and the away of this shirt was white with red trim in the same template) so I assume the use of grey as the trim colour was a result of the OFC supplying something that might be able to be used by multiple nations.

Tonga football has not had much success, which is hardly a surprise given that both rugby codes are so popular. From what I can find, Tonga haven’t won a senior men’s football game between 2011 and 2019 (time of writing). There are signs of progress at underage level, with the u19 men making history in qualifying for the 2018 OFC U19 Championship, having become the first Tongan team to top a qualifying campaign on the way. The senior women’s team has fared better, and actually won some games recently. They also claimed a third-place finish at the 2007 OFC Women’s Championship