Dear Nike,
I'll be the first to admit I'm somewhat of a conservative when it comes to my team's kit. I was in Barcelona only a short while before the 2010/2011 kit was replaced, and prompty descended upon Camp Nou like a tiny crazed australian mime-artist to obtain one with what little euros and spanish I had - not much of the former, none of the latter. I guess I didn't want to have to face change. (Sometimes I still rub my cheek to the unicef logo and purr. That's not weird, right?) And I'll also admit, at first I was a bit wary of the 2011/2012 edition, populated by suspiciously two-faced refugee stripes from an eighties racing car. But I've come around. I have grown to love them in all their retro glory, and not just because they frame Xavi like the anachronism I'm convinced he is. (It's, like, a bone structure thing. He's just not from this century.)
But these new ones. Nike, I just don't know. Sure, I loved them when I first saw them, but only until I realised with a surge of confusion that they weren't a joke. I was bewildered. Confounded. Discombobulated. I suspected the true explanation was that you have a disproportionate number of bring-your-child-to-work days, and little six year old Jenny filed her First Adventures With The Photoshop Rectangle Tool in to the wrong in-tray.
I've tried to understand, Nike, I really have. Is it nostalgia that has fuelled this? Do you pine for the days when men were real men, women were real women, and WordArt was the pinnacle of creative visualisation? There's a problem with that, Nike. These gradients aren't pacman or big-ass sunglasses or Vanilla Ice. They're not going to be awesome forever. Any fondness drifting in their direction only exists precisely because they're gone.
They're just really ugly.
Please make them go away.
I realise the resulting schadenfreude might bring happiness to Jose Mourinho, an increasingly endangered concept, and I applaud your humanitarian efforts. But there's a limit.
Seriously, please.
You're upsetting my design-y cule friends. They are weeping into their painstakingly-spaced Helvetica poems about how sad this whole thing makes them.
How's that for humanitarian.
Tragic haikus are ensuing.
... think about it.