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MADRID, SPAIN - APRIL 08: Champions League 02/03 Viertelfinale, Madrid; Real Madrid - Manchester United 3:1; Jubel Zinedine ZIDANE, Claude MAKELELE, RAUL/Real Madrid (Photo by Martin Rose/Bongarts/Getty Images) | Bongarts/Getty Images
The club began as Madrid Football Club in March 1902, with the Englishman Arthur Johnson among its founders. Johnson played centre-forward (and even in goal), scored Real’s first goal, and later became the club’s coach. He also shaped how it looked. The accepted story traces the white shirt to Corinthian, the London amateur side admired across the game for their conduct as much as their football. Corinthian declined to compete for trophies, played for years at The Oval, and were said to miss penalties on purpose rather than take an unfair advantage. Johnson, so it goes, wanted something of that spirit for his new club, and white was part of it.
It is a clean story, and it may well be true. But as Nick Miller sets out in The Guardian, the evidence is thinner than the repetition suggests. It is often said Johnson turned out for Corinthian, yet his name does not appear in the club’s match records before he left for Spain, so it cannot be confirmed he ever played for them, or even that he watched them at The Oval. What can be said is that he admired the club and pushed Real Madrid toward white. One detail worth noting – Corinthian wore white shirts with black shorts, whereas Madrid’s first strip was white shirts and shorts, with a red-and-yellow trim and black socks. The shirt was Corinthian white; the rest looks more like Spain than London.
The only time Madrid moved away from white shows how lightly the tradition was held, and how quickly it hardened. In 1926, two players, Félix Quesada and Perico Escobal, watched Corinthian while travelling through England, most likely at Crystal Palace by then, and came home determined to copy them. They persuaded president Pedro Parages to switch to black shorts. He was unconvinced but allowed it. The experiment lasted a year. After heavy defeats, among them a 5-1 loss to Barcelona in the Copa del Rey semi-final, Parages judged the shorts unlucky and put the white back on for good.
By the middle of the century the colour had become something other clubs wanted. Leeds United are the clearest case. As Ben Hayward notes for FourFourTwo, Don Revie changed Leeds to all-white in 1961, inspired by the great Real Madrid side of the era. Out went the blue and yellow, in came white, and the most successful spell in the club’s history followed. Revie made no secret of the influence. He wanted Leeds to become what Madrid already were, and he started with the shirt.
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