Have you ever been inside a top team’s changing rooms? It’s a legendary place.  And have you ever touched an athlete’s outfit? These are not just shirts, they are legends, woven with deeds and memories, vision and determination, toil and team spirit. And that’s not all. One shirt has something more to tell. A tale made of intuitions and sudden leaps forwards. A tale that began over 30 years ago, that continues to fuel the dreams of generations of fans.

Belgium, 2000 AD: under the gaze of millions of fans everything is set for the 11^th edition of the UEFA European Football Championship. The Italian team is ready for battle. But it’s not just the formation that catches the attention of the audience.

Giovanni Bruno (Journalist Sky Sport Director): At the time I was head of RAI’s entire sports department, and there was all this background noise and bewilderment: “What do you mean there’s a press conference on the team’s shirt?”

Marco Tardelli (Soccer World Cup Champion): As a player and as a coach I’ve seen countless shirts, and I have to say this one changed the entire idea of a football shirt.

Carlo Checchinato (Former Player and Director FIR): The first time I saw the KOMBAT shirt I never would’ve thought that the same shirt would also inspire a revolution in the world of rugby.

It’s called KOMBAT, and it’s the shirt for the modern athlete. But to understand where it comes from we have to travel back to a time when the game and its shirts were very different from what they are now...

Giovanni Bruno: In the beginning a shirt was a shirt, that was all. It could have a crew neck, a V neck, and it could be pseudo-technical: that means you had to wear something underneath it because you could feel cold. They were made of mixed wool and they often became matted just because they were washed over and over again, as we didn’t have many.

Marco Tardelli: Shirts were a bit different, a bit thicker. If it rained you had to carry a few extra pounds. It was a bit harder at the time, with shoes and everything. The gear is all different now.

At the time people listened to the match on the radio. You couldn’t watch it. Unless you went to watch it live. A shirt was just a shirt. And the footballers wearing them were just players. But something started to change during the Seventies. Maurizio Vitale, a young businessman from Torino, was the first to spot the coming tidal wave of change.

Marco Boglione (Founder and President of the BasicNet Group): Walking through New York we passed a chainstore called The Athlete’s Foot”  which was like “Foot Locker”’s forerunner in that they were shops selling sportswear.  We looked at this chain and I said to Vitale: “See, this is the jeans store of the future”

It wasn’t the first time Vitale anticipated change. Inspired by John Lennon in 1969 he turned his established family business inside out and launched new brands Robe di Kappa, young and informal, and Jesus Jeans, transgressive and unconventional. He was now ready to pick up on new trends.

Marco Boglione: It was the year the World Cup was played in Argentina, of Cabrini’s debut, and watching him play his first match Vitale just said: “That guy is a rock star”. And with me in tow, as usual, he met the fans waiting for the Italian team flying back to Malpensa airport.

Antonio Cabrini (Soccer World Cup Champion): the World Cup had finished the day before. Anticipating everyone else he went up to my father and said: “I want Antonio to be part of my company, I want to give him a contract”. That kind of thing was unheard of at the time.

Marco Tardelli: Vitale perfectly understood football’s enormous potential. Therefore Cabrini and I both became ambassadors for Robe di Kappa.

Italy, 1979. Vitale was firmly convinced that the future of clothing was bound to the world of sports and its champions. For this reason he decided to associate his new brand to a great football team.

Marco Boglione: We went to see Boniperti at Juventus, who was assisted by the managing director, Mr. Giuliano, and Vitale told them: “I want to sponsor Juventus”. And Boniperti said: “What does that mean? To sponsor Juventus?”. “I want to put the Robe di Kappa logo on Juventus shirts”. And Boniperti turned to Giuliano and said: “Does he want to give us money or does he want money from us?”. And Giuliano said: “No, I think he wants to give us some money”.

His company would provide the team’s outfits in exchange for displaying its logo on the shirts. The Robe di Kappa logo – later simplified in Kappa – features on the shirts of legendary players like Zoff, Bettega and Scirea. At the same time it arrived in the homes of millions of Italians, and not only.

Giovanni Bruno: It was a transition, it had something extraordinary about it, an amazing premonition of what has now become commonplace. 

Antonio Cabrini: That’s where it started, the venture of a company taking a team underarm and then together achieving great results.

Marco Tardelli: It was good for the whole of football, for players, for clubs.

Giovanni Bruno: because it set the standard for researching the brand, the logo to associate with a shirt, and fundamentally with that concept of clothing important for technical development.

It was the dawn of a new age. Football morphed into a market: companies, competition, innovation dominated the sector. Shirts discovered new synthetic fabrics. Players became world-famous idols. Kappa continued its rise, always a step ahead of the rest. In a bar in N.Y., Vitale signed a sponsorship deal for 1 million dollars with the US track and field team on a paper napkin.

Silvano Stella (Designer): The competition was huge, we’re talking about Adidas and Nike, ready to crush our company and feast on the remains.

The challenge was massive, the expectations sky-high. No mistakes were allowed. To fight off those giants, Vitale pulled out of the hat one of his brilliant intuitions. He moved the contest on to virgin ground. And two months before the Olympic games he knocked on the door of the American space agency, NASA.

Silvano Stella: We asked them to design a fabric that would protect the athletes from the sun’s rays, keeping their skin at a set temperature. It was a tool to help athletes perform better.

Giovanni Bruno: These tracksuits appeared, worn by American athletes, complete with a hood. To see something of the sort was, from the point of view of aesthetics: “O my God, what’s happening, I mean they designed them at NASA? Are they going to the moon?” They were missiles in the wind.

Silvano Stella: And all of a sudden every newspaper and journalist started talking about these revolutionary fabrics. Kappa conquered its place of honour among the world’s technical companies.

Archive: From Athens to Los Angeles. Kappa, official sponsor of the US track and field team

From that moment there was no turning back and an athlete’s outfit became an integral part of its performance. But this simple yet revolutionary concept was not taken in by every sport. And for Kappa it was now time to take on a new challenge and to move on to new frontiers.

Marco Boglione: New technologies are by definition new possibilities, opportunities for business. Inside BasicNet there’s an urge, a will, a duty, an ongoing emphasis on keeping up with technology.

Now the Italian company that has amazed the world is lead by Marco Boglione. After breathing new life into it after its bankruptcy he has reshaped it in his own image. A nerd ahead of his time – who, as a young man, would imagine the future leafing through Silicon Valley staple read “Popular Electronics” magazine, - he created his “fully web integrated company”: a global network of businessmen-partners connected to each other and to BasicNet thanks to the Group’s platforms

Gianluigi Gabetti (Honorary President Exor Spa): He’s someone who could’ve shared a lot with Steve Jobs and I think the way he runs the company reflects the innovative spirit typical of those innovators who change the course of history

It was the year 1999, Kappa had only been resurrected a few years earlier but it had already branded teams like Juventus, Milan when it was breaking every record, and Barcelona. But it was not enough. To make it clear to the world that Kappa was back with a vengeance, Boglione made a life-long dream come true: to sponsor the Italian national team

Emanuele Ostini (Kappa Global Brand Manager): That shirt had everyone’s eyes on it, and it had to clear the last obstacle, from the old generation of shirts to a new generation.

Giovanni Bruno: players ran around with this loose shirt flapping on their backs which wasn’t exactly becoming, those are years to be forgotten. Luckily at some stage an idea which was a true technical expression was conceived.

Emanuele Ostini: I had to turn over a new leaf (...) at that time I thought of something that I’d always noticed with curiosity and interest, and that was the world of surfing. Surf shirts are stretch. A surf shirt is made to go in the water, so fitness fabric could be a thing and do the trick, so in the end a surf shirt with a fitness fabric had the potential to radically alter old football shirts.

Slim, stretch, and lightweight, it sculpts the athlete’s body. In a world where getting to the ball a moment earlier or later can change the outcome of a match, even a shirt can help to score a goal.

Marco Boglione: We have to give the player in the box an extra 20 inches, whether he’s jumping or sprinting forwards. But with an extra 20 inches who knows how many more goals they will score. And that was the intellectual challenge, trying to give them a more precise rifle, give them an extra chance.

Emanuele Ostini: It was a lot harder to stop a player and players were much more visible to the referee.

Marco Boglione: Stop stopping, the shirt made it harder to be stopped on the field. “Referee-help: so it helped the referee because in football holding someone back is a foul. And 100% Italy. So wherever possible no brands on the front. Just the Italian flag. It was enough.

Giovanni Bruno: The concept of a shirt customized by the athlete’s body was born.

Simon Bamber (GL Investment Ltd. CEO/Ad): The name itself has become a kind of word to describe not only a product but an emotion.

Marco Boglione: So at one stage we said: “What do we name this shirt and this range?”, and that’s when KOMBAT was born. Then someone said: “Well, with a K of course”. And I said: “Obviously with a K”.

Emanuele Ostini: I remember that just before the European Championships I saw a photo shoot. It featured shirts and they were all more or less the same, apart from colours, graphics and logos, they were all more or less the same shape. They all fit the same. But it was obvious one of them was different and it was the Italian team’s shirt.

Archivio: We wanted to innovate on the technical front, hoping we might make a small contribution to the result which we hope will be extraordinary for Italy.

And Italy made it to the final. And that shirt, so different from the others, left an indelible mark.

Marco Tardelli: The players were all quite happy because they were all really fit, they liked to show off their bodies. At my age I wasn’t quite as happy...

Salvatore Giglio (Sport Photographer): Let’s say the Kombat was the 12^th player on the field because it allowed us to take different photos. It was spectacular also photographically.

Emanuele Ostini: Today everyone plays football wearing that shirt, the same shirt that looked so weird on the day, and gradually all the brands, one after the other, followed in our footsteps.

Marco Boglione: After that fight on both the technical and the stylistic issues I received a wonderful phone call.

The Kombat became the archetypal uniform for the modern footballer. From that moment nothing would ever be the same, not only in football.

Emanuele Ostini: We immediataly started working on the Kombat Rugby and that was, if you like, an even deeper change.

Marco Boglione: Being that tackling in rugby is admitted by the rules, and consequently holding onto the shirt, we had to avoid it. So we said: “Let’s make a shirt that can’t be tackled”.

Emanuele Checchinato: The previous shirt was very large and it made it easy to grab the opponent. Imagine: you run after someone, you grab them by the shirt, which is large and flapping everywhere, you can intercept them and stop them. With a shirt fitting closer to the body this becomes very hard indeed.

Emanuele Checchinato: In a very conservative world such as rugby that was definitely an innovation and a revolution.

Marco Boglione: Today there isn’t a team in the world that still plays wearing the old shirt.

Almost 20 years have gone by since the Kombat first appeared, 100 have elapsed since the company that has always managed to keep up with the times and innovate the world of clothes and sports was born. And today Kombat is synonymous with football, but also rugby, fencing, skiing and many other sports. The shirt is no longer a shirt. It is a spirit inspiring those who wear it, spawned by the passion of  its creators.

Matteo Marsaglia (Ski Racer FISI): Every time we reach the gate we’re glad we’re wearing a KOMBAT because we know that if it can help us gain anything, however small, it will.

Diana Luna (Professional Golfer FIG): During a turn it gives you another level of freedom of movement.

Christan Maggio (Footballer Napoli FC): And even if some opponent pulled on it I always managed to break free in the best way possible.

Silvano Stella: I think the Kombat shirt is like a symbol of this ability to throw our hearts beyond an obstacle.

Marco Boglione: We can be good, clever, pleasant, funny, use technology: but we must never forget that it’s a battle. Kombat could actually be a summary of what BasicNet is. The name contains a piece of our DNA. We fight.