MOST RIDICULOUS COLOURWAY NAMES 2010

We love football boots – there’s no question of that. We love getting new boots and we love getting new colourways. But here’s our problem, (and we’re sure it’s one you share) the names of the colours attached to football boots are getting out of hand.

It’s bad enough that our teammates ask us why we’re wearing bright Purple and Neon Orange football boots, but it’s made even worse when we explain that our £275 Superfly II’s are actually ‘Violet Pop/Max Orange’.

So, we’re here to exact a little revenge and name and shame some of the weirdest and most wonderful colourway names to come out in 2010.

Despite the fact that we love them all secretly.

1. Parachute Purple/Ebony/ Tender Shoots – Puma v1.10SL

This has to be a contender for not only Stupidest Colourway Name 2010, but perhaps of all time.

Starting with the Parachute Purple, this is one colourway name that we just plain don’t get! Sure, parachutes can indeed be purple, but they’re hardly notoriously purple are they?

We think Puma are cheating a bit here, we could call a hypothetical colourway ‘Telephone Cyan’ because one of the Footy-Boots.com staffers once saw a phone that might have been a light-blueish colour.

As for the Tender Shoots part? As we said when they were released, we could understand it if these were football boots being released for football loving Pandas. But they’re not.

“Why don’t I play football? There’s just never been a football boot that appeals to my love of tender shoots of bamboo. Puma made a WHAT?!”

2. Spicy Orange -'  Lotto FuerzaPura L100

On this list we’ll see Brands naming their colourways after temperatures, chemicals and the plasma of large cattle, but we’ve got to say that – for naming a colour after a taste – Lotto are deserving of ranking highly on this list.

The thing that makes it worse is there’s so much to go at with this colour – ‘Metallic Orange’, ‘Orange Rust’ or ‘Burnt Orange’ (then again, we’ve never burnt an orange…) would all sound great on a press release – but Spicy Orange just sounds daft.

Unless of course an Orange Vindaloo is a local delicacy in the caf'© round the corner from Lotto’s office. In which case we apologise and politely ask that they never invite us for lunch.

3. Windchill/Chlorine Blue -'  Nike Mercurial Vapor Superfly II

According to Wikipedia “Windchill (often popularly called the wind chill factor) is the felt air temperature on exposed skin due to wind.”. In other words, it’s meteorological concept, definitely not a colour.

We don’t really get what’s wrong with ‘White’ here – it’s not like there’s not enough colour going on the boot anyway!

And Chlorine Blue? Have Nike used a bottle of Domestos recently?

4. Oxblood – Umbro Specilai

This is a strange one, as we’re going to have to give it to Umbro on this one – this colour really is Oxblood Red (not that any of the Footy-Boots team have slaughtered an Ox, mind.).

But, we still have to ask why? If you spoke to any PR bod about why these flamboyant colourway names exist, they’d probably say something like “these colour names embody what we feel the colours represent, and ultimately make them more appealing to the customer”.

We’re not sure we’ve ever come across any Sunday morning footballer who is desperately vying for a pair of Oxblood football boots to enter their life.

Now if they’d named them “Umbro Speciali: Ron Burgundy Edition” we’d have unashamedly been all over them.

5. Team Orange – Puma PowerCat 1.10

Now, this is one of our absolute favourite Puma PowerCat colourways, so we were tempted to let it off the hook.

But, again this is a prime example of Puma blatantly cheating when they name their colours by simply taking a noun and putting it in front of an unrelated colour.

We can do this while just looking at our desk and a colour chart; “Monitor Green”, “Notepad Yellow” “Empty Box Under My Desk Fuschia” and “USB Port Maroon”. See? It’s not hard, Puma.

Puma’s Team Orange. Yesterday

We’d obviously like to point out that we love each of the football boots in this piece, and we’re just having a bit of fun at the expense of some of the names!

So, those are (in our opinion) the worst offenders for daft colourway names this year – but we want to know which you think are the the daftest colourway names; sound off in the comments below!