Season 2026/27 · The Shaw
The ground is dark and the stands are empty. Scroll, and the lights come on one mast at a time, until the new kit is revealed with thirty-one thousand people behind it.
Scroll to switch on the lightsWe were founded by ironworkers. We were burned to the ground. We were rebuilt by hand, by the people who still stand here. We do not do quiet.
Four chapters · four masts
Each chapter switches on one bank of floodlights behind you. By the end of the fourth, the ground is lit and half full. Then we show you the shirt.
Chapter one
North-east mast · bank 1 of 4
Twenty-two men from the Ravenshaw Iron & Steel works marked out a pitch on the cinder ground behind the rolling mill and played the first match in October 1886. They lost. They came back the next Saturday.
The club took its colours from the works: black for the furnace, crimson for the metal at heat. The ground has been called The Shaw ever since, and nobody has moved it an inch.
Chapter two
South-east mast · bank 2 of 4
The cup run of 1931 went further than anyone at The Shaw had a right to expect. Four rounds, three away wins, and a semi-final on a frozen pitch that finished under gaslight.
It was the first season of the crimson sash across a black shirt. The board thought it a passing fashion. The terraces refused to let it go.
Chapter three
South-west mast · bank 3 of 4
On a Tuesday night in March 1974 the old wooden Shaw End caught fire and was gone by morning. The club had no insurance worth the paper and a fixture in eleven days.
Supporters turned up with tools. Steelworkers, joiners, a retired surveyor. The new stand was concrete, ugly and ours. It is the loudest end in the division and we would not change a single block.
Chapter four
North-west mast · bank 4 of 4
This is the 140th season at The Shaw. The floodlights that go on tonight are the fourth set to stand on these corners. The noise underneath them has never changed.
For the anniversary the club has gone back to 1931. Black shirt. Crimson sash. Nothing on the front but the raven. Read on and switch the last light on.
The 2026/27 home kit
The sash is back. Black shirt, crimson from the right shoulder to the left hip, nothing on the front but the raven.
Ninety-five years after it first went on. Keep scrolling for every stitch.
Three shirts · one angle
Home, away and the last line. Photographed under the Shaw floodlights, not in a studio. The sash sits at the same angle on all three, measured from the 1931 original.
Black shirt. Crimson sash. The 1931 angle, measured from the original.
Chalk shirt with the sash inverted in black. Built for the grounds where they hate us most.
Deep crimson, head to toe. So the back four always know where the last line is.
The sash runs right shoulder to left hip at 38 degrees, taken from the surviving 1931 shirt in the club museum.
No front-of-shirt sponsor for the first time since 1983. Partners sit on the sleeve. The raven stands alone.
The founding year is woven inside the collar in crimson thread, where only the player wearing it can see it.
The inside of the shirt is dyed the grey of the original cinder pitch. You will never see it. That is the point.
From the dressing room
You do not wear this shirt. You carry it. Fourteen thousand people in the Shaw End make sure you remember that every week.
I stood on that concrete with my grandad when I was six. The first time I ran out under those lights I looked for his spot before I looked at the ball.
Crimson from neck to boot. When the ground is full and the lights are up, you can see me from the far end. Good. Come and try.
August · the first month
The season opens at home on Saturday 8 August. Members get first call on every ticket, home and away.
Become a memberMembership 2026/27
The ground behind you is full because people like you keep turning up. Membership is priority on every ticket, a vote at the AGM, and a place under the lights on 8 August.