Launching the Chelsea ’74 Range – designed to stand out!

The Chelsea ‘74 Range is inspired by a standout away strip from the club’s past, a kit with a very different look from most our players have worn over the years.

That shirt, a fan favourite back in the day, is now available again in replica form. For sale with it are a polo shirt, a track top, a sweatshirt, a t-shirt, hats, a scarf and a mug, all with the distinctive striped red, white and green design. 

The colour combination was a classic of its era and even led to Chelsea fans nicknaming the shirts worn away from home in the 1974/75 season the ‘Castrol GTX kit’, so similar was it to the cans of the most-advertised motor oil of the day – a colour scheme seen on every TV screen and at motor races with sponsored cars easy to spot on the grid.  

So what inspired the Chelsea away kit design back then? Chelsea managers having their say on what their players sported was not new. Indeed, it was Tommy Docherty behind the royal blue shirt and shorts and white stocks that is still our main look today.  

His successor, Dave Sexton, who won the FA Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup, was not alone in being a massive admirer of the ‘Magnificent Magyars’, the Hungary team that revolutionised the way the game was played back in the 1950s. Who in England had seen a drag-back before Puskas, Hidegkuti and co. so famously won at Wembley?

In a homage to the Hungarians, Sexton had their colours on a Chelsea change kit two decades later and it evolved into the ’74 stripes, but above all it is a striking look that lives again today. 

In addition to the replica away shirt in the Chelsea ’74 range, the white polo shirt and track top have thin-line red and green trimming and club badge, while the green and red colours are more prominent on the sweatshirt and t-shirt.

A bobble knitted hat, a baseball cap, a bar scarf and a ’74 mug complete the accessories available in the collection which can be viewed in the gallery below.

The Chelsea ’74 Range is on sale now as an exclusive in our online store and at the Megastore at Stamford Bridge