Chad

Home; 2012/13

This shirt was a speculative purchase years ago from fellow collector and national shirts authority Nick, from the Football Shirt World website. Sascha, aka Shirtlock Holmes, had arranged the purchase of some replica shirts directly with Mahatmat Abouma, owner of Abouma Sports in Chad. Chad was, and still is, notoriously hard to get an authentic shirt from. Abouma supplied these blue home shirts, along with a bunch of red away shirts. When it became almost impossible to find pictures of a Chad team wearing either version, the shirts began to be written off as a scam at worst, and at best a miscommunication over them being shirts and not training wear. Some Chad players even reported back to Sascha and Nick that they had indeed worn the shirt in games, but still no evidence could be produced.

Then, a few years later, this photo surfaced which shows the Chad u20 team wearing both the red away version and the blue home version. From this picture, it would appear that the blue home was being used as a goalkeeper shirt for the away kit. However, given that Chad regularly play in blue as a home colour, my opinion is the shirt doubles as both an outfield and goalkeeper shirt if needed due to a kit clash. Though the replica version doesn’t carry the manufacturer logo on the front, the tag on the side seam can clearly be seen in the match picture, and the ‘Tchad’ print can be partially seen on the back.

All in all, given the evidence on show, this is in my mind an official Chad shirt. In my opinion, when a recognised national team takes the field in a shirt, it counts as a recognised national shirt. In the majority of cases these games are easy to vouch for as they are friendlies, qualifiers or tournament games. But sometimes they are against non-FIFA sides, club teams or might be ‘B’ internationals or underage games. This second grouping of fixtures can blur the line for some collectors in what is a ‘legitimate’ national shirt for their collection. This is personal preference, but to me it less about how FIFA classify the game but whether the team wearing the shirt is the true representative team for that country. For example, the shirt worn by the fake Togo team which I wrote about previously would never be an acceptable Togo shirt. But the infamous Mitre Cameroon ‘flag’ shirt does count as a legitimate because it was worn by the offical senior team, albeit against a club side in a World Cup warm-up game in the USA in 1994.

But back to Chad, and this shirt, the only information readily available is that it was possibly taken in Egypt in 2012 or 2013. Now, the records of Chad u20 games around this time is less than thorough but we do know that the u20s were knocked out by Sierra Leone in qualification for the 2013 African u20 Championship. There is video for the first leg, which shows Chad wearing navy-blue shirts with yellow shorts but not the shirt I have. That does suggest that my shirt was an outfield shirt which doubled as a goalkeeper as in the picture in the first paragraph. Libya knocked Chad out of qualifying for the 2015 version. All this leads me to believe the shirt I have was probably worn in a friendly.