U14 Sporting CP home shirt

Sporting played Athletic Bilbao for the 1/8 finals (round of 16) in the 1985/86 UEFA Cup. The first match was in Bilbao, and Sporting lost 1-2. The home leg was in Lisbon, the 11th December 1985, in a packed Alvalade Stadium. Sporting won 3-0 with goals from Manuel Fernandes (penalty), Meade, and Sousa, and qualified for the next round.

The referee was Jan Keizer, from the Netherlands, and the linesmen were M. Bannet and Chris van de Laar, a Dutch international referee from Enschede (in the photo with legend Johan Cruijff, one of verdebranco's football idols as a child).

After the game, Sporting offered three shirs to Chris van de Laar. They were not from the game itself, where the Sporting team wore the traditional green/white hoops, in one of the most beautiful designs Sporting ever had, made by the Le Coq Sportif brand.

We already showed the first of those shirts, a beautiful LCS green away longsleeved shirt. It was a pre-season shirt, with the number 17, but nevertheless a rare model seldom seen - I know of perhaps another four such shirts, one with a friend collector, one with a fan, and one belongs to the Sporting CP museum, but it is in the reserve, as it has never been displayed to the public.

The second shirt was a white training shirt, corresponding to a much older model. Verdebranco has a very similar shirt identified as late 1960s early 1970s, but the white shirt offered to Chris van de Laar was not match worn.

We show here the third shirt: It just so happened that Chris had a son, Roy, who was 12 years old at the time, and so Sporting offered a U14 hooped shirt. It is made of cotton, very likely matchworn by some portuguese youth of the time, and it is a very pretty cute shirt.

Verdebranco came to obtain these three shirts after a friendly contact with Roy, Mr. Chris van de Laar's son. It implied speaking a little bit of Dutch, which was a pleasure after quite a few years. The contact itself was also excellent. And to make a good thing even better, verdebranco managed to establish contact between van de Laar and a fellow collector from a different club. But that is a story we don't tell!