This time we see Cabourn team up with our good pals at Umbro for a new collection inspired by football styles from the late 1940’s to early 1950’s. The partnership debuts with a ten-style collection which acknowledges Umbro’s commitment to the footballing world. When we meet at the Nigel Cabourn Army Gym in Covent Garden, Nigel shakes my hand with the warmest welcoming smile. “You’re Jonny from PENALTY Magazine, what a great name” he says (he didn't mean mine).

Nigel continues to tell me that he has loved football since he was four years old. Growing up in the North, where the love of football is like nothing else, he tells me how he dreamt of being a goalkeeper. “I’m a passionate man” he says, “being a goalkeeper was all I wanted to do when I grew up and I was fully passionate about that, I think I just wasn’t tall enough”. Lev Shavin, otherwise known as ‘The Black Panther’, was a Soviet footballer regarded by Nigel and many others as the greatest goalkeeper in the history of sport. Nigel tells me how Shavin was a huge inspiration to him and how his current collaboration with Moscow Dynamo, Shavin’s boyhood club at which he made 326 appearances, is a highlight of his career to date.

Aside from working with Moscow Dynamo, which only came about this year, the Cabourn brand hasn’t worked with a football brand before, but it has come close. Prior to Mike Ashley buying Newcastle in 2007, Freddy Shepard came to Nigel and asked him to design the Newcastle kit. This was the era that saw Newcastle Brown stitched so fittingly on the front. A dream collaboration that unfortunately didn’t go ahead. 

Nigel enthusiastically explains how collaborating with Umbro feels like a full circle moment, having worn the brand as a child growing up and therefore having spent the majority of his life feeling deeply fond of it. “Every child was wearing Umbro in the 1950’s, it was part of the school uniform” he says, “It was worn by Alf Ramsey during the 1966 World Cup”. 

We speak about how one of his earliest influences within football was the much loved tabletop football game Subbuteo, in which players simulate association football by flicking miniature players with their fingers. “I did really well in the Subbuteo World Cup in Hartlepool in the 1960’s” he tells me. “The game was born in 1948 and I was born in 1949, so it was the game that shaped my childhood.” 

Out of his 4000 piece vintage collection, I ask what his favourite piece of vintage sportswear is. He ponders for a second. “It has to be my Arsenal away shirt, it’s red with green sleeves and it’s from about 1938 and it’s a piece I love to wear. I paid around 700-800 quid for that piece but it’s definitely up there as being a firm favourite, I wear it with Bombay Bloomers army pants”. He assures me that this is only for vintage purposes, because he’s a Scunthorpe fan at heart. 

Whilst we are standing in Army Gym, model Taylor is trying on new pieces from the Umbro collection and Nigel is effortlessly mixing the casual sportswear with the Mallory jacket that he started selling 20 years ago. When I ask him his ambitions for this collaboration, he tells me how much research went into it. “I wanted to create a collection that wasn’t anchored by the audience we were making it for, this is contemporary football gear, made for everybody”. After all, Nigel Cabourn doesn’t follow trends. 

Shop the full collection at Umbro.