Wenger began soccer's obsession with puffy jackets

  • May 3, 2021 11:47 PM PDT
    Wenger began soccer's obsession with puffy jackets


    Some say it began with Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal icon, on Oct. 16, 2010, against Birmingham City, when he wore a full-length, five-partition Nike Storm Fit winter coat that came down to his knees -- a foot longer than his puffy jacket from the previous season. Some say Jose Mourinho's assistant coach at Inter, Daniele Bernazzani, wore a big down puffer before Wenger did, early winter 2010, at the Coppa Italia. Some say it was Mourinho, who wore his at Chelsea practice, sometime before March that same year.Get more news about [url=https://www.futbolucl.com/c/Soccer-Kids-Mini-kits_c272]Kids Mini Jersey[/url],you can vist futbolucl!

    Some say it just sprang up and finding a patient zero for the long soccer parka, a universal and infamous piece of clothing, is like trying to trace the first player to wear colored cleats.Soccer is a copycat sport. It might have been Mourinho or Wenger who went first -- there's also a fair shout for Malcolm Allison, who managed Manchester City and Crystal Palace in the 1970s, as the first true parka-wearer in English soccer -- but in the past decade it's become a movement, with downy coats stretching across Europe and into the Americas.

    England gets frigid in the winter; soon after the jackets bubbled up there, they ended up across top-flight European leagues. While managers' need for warmth wasn't taken seriously at first -- the meme economy was lousy with jokes about Wenger's long jacket and its correlation with missing titles -- the jackets were too practical to ignore.

    Parkas cut for the pitch have since spread beyond soccer to high fashion. But they're not really found in the stands and are not easily available for fans to buy. In fact, they're barely sportswear and mostly produced now, without club logos, by fashion houses in Milan and Paris. Why does an infamous piece of club merchandise only sell in odd, remaindered sizes, in modified versions, in second-hand stores or showcase them on catwalks?The New York Times ran a story about soccer managers' ugly coats shortly after a definitive Wenger meme went viral, a zipper malfunction during a 2012 Arsenal win over Newcastle. The story singled out Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson and Rafael Benitez as ill-dressed; Roberto Mancini, Mourinho and Andre Villas-Boas were suave by comparison. Sarah Lyall, the Times' London correspondent who wrote the story, identified three archetypes: the "East German apparatchik, suave Italian and slob in a tracksuit." Wenger's long down coat, worn oversized, had an Eastern Bloc chicness to it but six years ago, it was "aggressively unstylish." The paper described Wenger's parka as "oddly elongated, sausage-like... makes him look like a caterpillar... [a] multizippered, hooded curiosity."

    In a phone interview, Lyall said stylish dress was one way Premier League coaches made their authority over players more absolute. Natty Europeans seemed to do what basketball coaches do here, "[priding] themselves on being super sharply dressed as a way of exerting some sort of authority over the pitch when they were coaching." It's a type of fear through style.

    Lyall told me she focused on Wenger's jacket since it was "a source of huge amusement and ridicule for both Arsenal fans and non-Arsenal fans." As she saw it, his parka overshadowed his suits. She also preferred Mancini's slim-fitting, nonchalant style, and then-Exeter boss Paul Tisdale's overcoats and foulards, to the slovenly tracksuits worn by some coaches. Still, a long down jacket is a better career move than an umbrella and in the past decade, it's become a feature across soccer.