Wolves home kits through the years

Wolves’ famous colours are known the world over but due to contractual obligations to try to persuade fans to fork out the best part of £50 a year, the classic gold and black look has been tampered with – with good and bad results – many times over the years.

They took a while to settle on the winning gold and black formula, though. Wolves of course actually began their existence playing in red and white stripes, perish the thought, but while the stripes stayed until 1922 the colour quickly changed to a deep gold and black.

Then for 40 or so years came the definitive classic gold shirts and black shorts, including through the club’s glorious heyday of the 1950s where the ‘old gold’ was gloriously prominent as Stan Cullis’ team conquered the country and beat some of Europe’s finest.

Peter Broadbent (below), Billy Wright, Johnny Hancocks et al donned the classic kit.

The old gold extended to shorts in the 1960s for a strikingly bright number with tidy black trim, worn by legends like Derek Dougan and Peter Knowles.

Then from the 1970s onwards came a fancy new logo and a darker shade of gold, worn by Mike Bailey when lifting the 1974 League Cup.

Technology allowed for synthetic fibres to be worn by the time 1980 came around when another League Cup victory thanks to Andy Gray's Wembley winner saw Wolves wear their last sponsor-free shirt.

Tatung and Benjamin Perry were the club’s first main shirt sponsors but due to successive relegations and the worst period in Wolves’ history, they aren’t remembered half as fondly as Staw Distribution whose logo adorned shirts in the Steve Bull renaissance era, which included a Wembley win in the Sherpa Van Trophy (Andy Mutch and Robbie Dennison, below, scored the goals in a 2-0 win over Burnley). After four years of pinstripes, the faint two-shaded stripes were also a hit.

Then, to coincide with the start of years of mediocrity in the 1990s, a ghastly shirt complete with quite bizarre tyre marks (to reflect Goodyear’s sponsorship) was unveiled in 1992 – and prematurely scrapped a year later. Even Paul Cook looks embarrassed to wear it.

After that a no-nonsense 1994 edition complete with a return to the Wolverhampton coat of arms was a rare success in the modern kit era, as modelled by cult hero John de Wolf.

In 1996 came a snazzy love-it-or-hate-it wolf head template kit with plenty of black on the arms. Hip young things like Robbie Keane and, er, Glenn Crowe, may have enjoyed it but Steve Bull was surely pining for old gold shirts and black shorts. The turqoise away kit wasn't much better.

A far more popular version of the black sleeves came in 2014 for Wolves' return to the Championship under Kenny Jackett. Scott Golbourne is used to more fashionable attire but Bakary Sako looks happy enough.

A number of ‘meh’ versions have been met with general indifference in recent years – but the new old gold version looks set to be a hit.