Some collaborations make total sense. Football and boots. Football and beer. Football and a man on television being absolutely certain about something he cannot possibly know. This is not one of those. Nobody asked for Van Gogh FC. We made it anyway — and then we got carried away and worked out what the away kit would look like.
Every studio has a whiteboard, and every whiteboard eventually gets the word WHY written on it in permanent marker by someone who has run out of patience. Art FC is what happens when nobody rubs it off and everyone keeps working regardless.
Let me be clear about the process here, because there wasn't one. No research was conducted. No gap in the market was identified. At no stage did a supporter write in to say what this sport is crying out for is Rothko. There was no strategy document, no moodboard presented to a client, no meeting in which someone said the words "cultural adjacency" and everyone nodded.
There was a joke. And then there was a second joke, which was better than the first. And by about the sixth one, it had stopped being a joke and started being a collection.
Ten clubs. None of them exist. All of them, we are now convinced, should.
So here is the league table nobody requested: who they'd be, what they'd wear, how they'd play, and how long the manager would last.
Van Gogh FC
Swirling post-impressionist sky, collapsed into a shield. The badge that makes you want to know what the away kit looks like — so we decided.
Shop the Art FC badges →Club file
- Home kit
- Cobalt blue, thick yellow trim, and a sublimated swirl across the shoulders that looks slightly different every time you glance at it. Sold out in eleven minutes.
- Away kit
- Wheat gold. Enormously unpopular for about four years, then suddenly the most sought-after shirt in the country.
- Ground
- Small, exposed, and sitting under a sky far too big for it. Only ever looks right at night.
- Style of play
- Four at the back in theory. Nobody has seen the theory. Heartbreakingly beautiful, structurally indefensible.
- The manager
- Sacked in March. Bronze statue outside the south stand within the decade.
The real Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889, from a room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, looking out at a pre-dawn sky. It hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where roughly a million people a year stand in front of it not saying anything.
He sold almost nothing while he was alive. The popular line that he only ever shifted one painting is disputed by the Van Gogh Museum itself, but the shape of the story survives the fact-check: enormous output, no recognition, total canonisation about five minutes after it stopped being any use to him. Which is the single most football career arc in the history of human endeavour, and we're not going to pretend that wasn't the appeal.
Fact The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds the largest collection of his work in the world, including hundreds of letters, most of them written to his brother Theo. Almost the entire body of work came from little more than a decade of painting.
Matisse FC
Shapes cut clean and placed with total confidence. Nothing decorative, nothing wasted — which is always the giveaway that it took ages.
Shop the Art FC badges →Club file
- Home kit
- Flat blocks of colour. No gradients, no piping, no sponsor logo bigger than it needs to be. The kit manufacturer begged for a pattern and was told no.
- Ground
- Bright, warm, absurdly good light. Away fans keep saying it doesn't feel like a football ground and then not wanting to leave.
- Style of play
- Three passes where everyone else needs nine. Unbearably slow until you realise it has already happened.
- Squad age
- Oldest in the division. Entirely on purpose.
- The manager
- Will not be rushed. Has never once been rushed.
Late in life, in poor health and largely confined to bed and a wheelchair, Henri Matisse could no longer work at an easel the way he had. So he changed position. He took scissors to sheets of painted paper and made the cut-outs — Jazz, The Snail, the great blue nudes — and described it as drawing with scissors. For a lot of people that final phase is the best thing he ever did.
Which is the great player whose legs go, who drops fifteen metres deeper, stops running and starts thinking, and has the four best seasons of his career from a position nobody imagined him playing. We didn't set out to make that point. It just turned up while we were choosing colours.
Matisse lost the ability to do the thing he was famous for and responded by inventing a different thing. That's not a comeback. That's a positional switch.
Picasso FC
Fragmented planes, several viewpoints at once, a shield you have to look at twice. Nobody is quite sure which way it's facing, which is the idea.
Shop the Art FC badges →Club file
- Home kit
- Front and back appear to be from different seasons. Officially a manufacturing error. Unofficially the best-selling shirt they've ever produced.
- Style of play
- Total positional rotation. The full-back is a midfielder, the winger is inside, the centre-back is the playmaker, and none of them will confirm this on the record.
- Opposition analysts
- Arrive with a plan. Leave with a headache.
- Reinvention cycle
- Roughly every eighteen months. Correct every single time, which is the truly annoying part.
- The manager
- Untouchable. Knows it.
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed Cubism in the years before the First World War on a disarmingly simple premise: show the subject from several angles at once, on a flat surface, and let the viewer's brain assemble it. It broke the fixed single perspective European painting had been built on for centuries.
Try explaining modern positional rotation to somebody who last watched football in 1994 and you will find yourself making the identical argument, badly, with a salt shaker and two coasters.
Picasso also gave us Guernica in 1937 — enormous, monochrome and furious — which is a useful reminder that all the formal invention was in service of something. Style with nothing underneath it is just a nice kit. We have made some nice kits. We know the difference.
Kahlo FC
Unmistakable, unmissable, completely uninterested in blending in. A crest with a stare.
Shop the Art FC badges →Club file
- Home kit
- Deep green with hot pink trim and marigolds worked into the collar. Nobody else in the league would dare. That's rather the point.
- Ground
- A blue house with a garden, somehow holding thirty thousand people. The most intimidating away trip in the division, because everyone inside it means it.
- Style of play
- Plays through the pain and refuses to hide. Never once passes sideways to avoid responsibility.
- The supporters
- Know precisely who they are. Have never needed anyone's permission.
Frida Kahlo was eighteen when the bus she was travelling in collided with a tram in Mexico City. The injuries shaped the rest of her life and required repeated surgeries. She began painting seriously during her recovery, working from bed, and a large share of her output — by common count somewhere around a third — were self-portraits.
Football wears the word resilience out. Every manager says it. Almost nobody means anything by it. Then you read about somebody who spent decades in genuine physical pain and made work so specific and unflinching that it changed how an entire country sees itself, and the word gets its weight back. That badge is the one we were most careful with.
Fact Kahlo's family home in Coyoacán, the Casa Azul, is now the Museo Frida Kahlo. She lived and worked there for much of her life.
Da Vinci FC and Dalí FC
Club file — Da Vinci FC
- Style of play
- Revolutionary. Largely theoretical. The pressing structure exists in a notebook, written right to left, which nobody on the coaching staff can read.
- Transfer policy
- Four hundred pages of plans. Three implemented. Every one of the three worked.
- Last season
- Finished eleventh. Invented something the champions will be using in nine years.
Club file — Dalí FC
- Home kit
- Melts. The manufacturer has been asked repeatedly to explain this and will not.
- Style of play
- Enormous technical ability deployed in service of decisions nobody requested and nobody can forget.
- Press conferences
- Fined. Every time. Worth it.
Leonardo da Vinci filled thousands of notebook pages with anatomical studies, engineering schemes and observations about how birds stay in the air, much of it in his famous mirror script. He also left a genuinely irritating number of commissions unfinished. Football's great over-thinker, four centuries early.
Salvador Dalí is the opposite problem and somehow the same one. The Persistence of Memory, with its soft clocks, was painted in 1931 and is one of the most recognisable images of the twentieth century. Every league has a Dalí. He is usually a number ten, he is invariably maddening, and once a season he does something so preposterous that people are still describing it at funerals thirty years later.
Rothko FC
Blocks of colour, soft edges, nothing happening and everything happening. The most divisive badge in the collection, which is entirely appropriate.
Shop the Art FC badges →Club file
- Home kit
- Two stacked blocks of colour with soft edges and no outline on the crest. Half the fanbase calls it the finest shirt ever made. The other half wants a refund.
- Ground
- Dark, quiet, built for standing close. Sit in the front row or don't bother coming.
- Style of play
- Nothing happens for ninety minutes. It is completely overwhelming.
- Typical result
- 0-0. Best game of the season.
Mark Rothko made vast canvases of stacked, hazy rectangles and wanted people to stand close to them — close enough that the painting fills your field of vision and stops being an object you are looking at. The Rothko Chapel in Houston, which opened in 1971, was built around exactly that idea: a room of his dark canvases and nothing else to do but be in there.
People walk past a Rothko and say my kid could do that. People walk out of a goalless draw and say waste of an afternoon. Both are counting events, and events were never the thing.
Nothing happened and it was extraordinary. If you've ever tried to explain a great 0-0 to somebody who doesn't watch football, you already understand Rothko.
The noisy end: Beethoven, Mozart and Hendrix
Football isn't a silent sport, so the collection doesn't stop at painters. Three musicians round it out, and yes, we are aware that this stretches the definition of an art series. We were past caring by then.
Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his Ninth Symphony in Vienna in 1824, by which point his hearing loss was profound. He had written one of the most performed works in the Western canon and could not properly hear it. There is no football equivalent to that, and inventing one would be an insult to both.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg in 1756, died in Vienna in 1791 at thirty-five, having produced a catalogue of more than six hundred works. That is a full career that ends before most players have finished their coaching badges.
And Jimi Hendrix — left-handed, playing right-handed guitars flipped over and restrung, gone at twenty-seven in 1970 — who comprehensively rewrote what the instrument was for in roughly four years of recording. Every generation of football gets one of those. Arrives, makes everyone else look like they'd been doing it wrong, leaves far too early.
Fact Flipping a right-handed Stratocaster and restringing it changed the instrument's feel and its tonal balance — part of why Hendrix's sound has proved so difficult for other players to reproduce exactly.
So, why?
There isn't a thesis here. I'm not going to tell you that football is secretly a gallery, or that the terraces are the last great public art space, or any of the other things people say when they're trying to make a t-shirt sound like a PhD. Football is football. Art is art. They are not the same and they don't need to be.
What they do share is a shield. Clubs have always compressed an entire identity into one small symbol, and so has every artist who ever developed a style you could recognise across a room. Once you've noticed that, you cannot un-notice it, and then you're on the fourth crest and someone is asking what Dalí's away kit would look like.
Nobody asked for this. We made it anyway. Occasionally that's the whole brief — and football, of all things, should understand. Half the best parts of this game are things nobody requested. Nobody asked for the away end to sing for ninety minutes when they're three down. They just do it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Strip Tees Art FC series?
Art FC is a Strip Tees design series that reimagines celebrated artists and composers as football clubs, each with its own crest. The designs use the visual language of both worlds — the shield, the palette, the motif — and appear on tees, hoodies and accessories.
Which artists and composers feature in the collection?
The series includes Van Gogh FC, Matisse FC, Picasso FC, Kahlo FC, Da Vinci FC, Rothko FC, Dalí FC, Beethoven FC, Mozart FC and Hendrix FC.
Why put artists on football badges?
Honestly, because nobody asked us to. There was no market research and no strategy. A club crest and an artist's signature style do the same job — compress an entire identity into something you recognise instantly — and once that occurred to us, the collection more or less designed itself.
Where can I buy the Art FC range?
The range is available from Strip Tees at striptees.com.au. Strip Tees is an independent Australian football label founded in 2018, printing on demand using ethically sourced materials, with worldwide shipping.
Sources & further reading
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam — vangoghmuseum.nl (Van Gogh's output, the letters to Theo, and the "one painting sold" myth)
- The Museum of Modern Art, New York — moma.org (The Starry Night, 1889; The Persistence of Memory, 1931)
- Tate — tate.org.uk (Matisse's cut-outs; Mark Rothko)
- Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid — museoreinasofia.es (Guernica, 1937)
- Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City — museofridakahlo.org.mx (Kahlo's life and the Casa Azul)
- Rothko Chapel, Houston — rothkochapel.org (opened 1971)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — britannica.com (Leonardo da Vinci; Salvador Dalí; Beethoven; Mozart; Jimi Hendrix)
- Strip Tees — striptees.com.au (Art FC badge designs and product information)
Everything above is real. The kits, grounds, formations and managerial life expectancies are entirely made up, and we'd like that on the record.
Wearable art for people who actually get it. Shop Art FC at striptees.com.au →
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