Bob Marley Inspired Ajax Third Kit To Be Available Soon

Dutch football giant AFC AJAX will honor Reggae megastar Bob Marley with a third kit for their 2021-2022 Eredivisie season.

This confirmation comes after last month’s overwhelming response to leaked plans that the club would develop a design based on the Adidas tracksuit aficionado’s song Three Little Birds, Ajax’s unofficial anthem since 2008. A release has indicated that the club would be sporting an all-black kit, featuring the sponsored Adidas three-stripe trademark, the Rastafarian colors of red, gold, and green around the shoulders, and the three little birds alongside Amsterdam’s famous XXX sign on the neck.

An Ajax representative told DancehallMag that replica jerseys will be launched before the start of the new season and will be available for purchase on their official fan shop. “Unfortunately there is no date specifically,” they said.

The club intends to use their red and white jersey for home games, and their glacial blue for away matches.  They’ll use the Bob Marley-inspired kit if the blue kit clashes with the opposing team while they are away from home.

Daughter of the late reggae legend and head of the Bob Marley group of companies, Cedella Marley, recently shared with The Star that the family was pleased with the partnership and that the demand for the kit, as well as its impact, was a feat the Reggae King would have appreciated.

“We are very proud of this collaboration. My father’s love for football is well known and we’ve seen and heard from many footballers that his music inspires them.”

Cedella continued, “The energetic reaction from fans of Marley, Ajax, and football on a whole shows once again the powerful impact that can happen when people come together behind a common goal with positive intentions”.

This is only the latest in a slew of kits, shirts, and jerseys paying homage to Bob Marley, a noted lover of the game, in recent times. Irish club Bohemian debuted a Marley-inspired shirt in 2019, which later had to be updated due to copyright issues.

Following that was Adidas’ Winter 2020 fashion line dubbed the Wales Bonner x Adidas collection, which was “inspired by Bob Marley, Adidas’ extensive archive, the 1970s and Dancehall, the latter being an ongoing theme in designer Grace Wales Bonner’s collections”.

According to GQ, “Bonner has taken the iconic three-striped Adidas tracksuit and given it an elevated rework by way of embroidery, crocheted stripe details and oversized ribbing, paying homage to her British-Jamaican roots and memories of those sports-centric dancehall uniforms, as well as Marley, who famously wore his sportswear in an elegant way.”