The Bills and Sabres each offer countless retail options for fans to deck themselves out in on gameday. Between jerseys, workout gear, hoodies, shorts and hats, both teams have everything you could ever want.
But I was brainstorming the other day about how cool various concept jerseys often look and how it would be cool if a team acted on some of the concepts you see floating around the internet. Not just sport specific either, but the crossovers you see like basketball to hockey, football to baseball, etc. 
So as I started doodling I realized the Bills and Sabres could develop a line of apparel – jerseys in this case – which capitalizes on the love design-oriented people have for creating concept jerseys. I dubbed this “line” of apparel the Futbol Series and applied it specifically to the Bills and Sabres.
It wouldn’t be very difficult to double down and call this the One Buffalo Futbol Series and rope in the Bandits and other PSE ventures. But starting with the Bills and Sabres offered the easiest starting point and offered the most fun in terms of lunchtime photoshop practice.
What you’ll find below are six total “home” and “away” Bills and Sabres soccer kits along with a single alternate kit for each team. I used a base Nike soccer kit as my template and my rudimentary photoshop skills. Each uniform was mocked up with a player’s name and number along with a blank version. This was done for the purposes of imagining them as a retail option, as each team could sell both versions.
As someone who isn’t a huge fan of a traditional block number font I chose to go a different route for each set. The Sabres uniforms utilize the team’s font package from the infamous Slug uniforms. The Bills is simply a more modern, rounded look that is commonplace on soccer uniforms around the world.
The actual retail application of such a venture would probably be fairly unrealistic – or at least very difficult to accomplish. An authentic soccer kit goes for well over $125 and even replica kits with fewer stretch or performance features still fetch a fair amount. Assuming each team sold the replica Nike version of these, you’d still have a traditional set of paneling for each kit’s features, without the added cost of the tighter, dri-fit design of a true authentic.
I do feel that there would be a fair market for these. Fans of the Bills and Sabres who are also soccer junkies would almost certainly find these appealing and even non-soccer fans may like the dri-fit feel and the look of the jerseys. I fully understand that soccer isn’t a sport for everyone and the beauty of this practice is that it doesn’t need to appeal to every single fan of the team. In the event a fan (or fans) found these to be heinous there’s no harm and no foul. I certainly wouldn’t have dropped a single dollar on the Turd Jerseys and I wouldn’t be shocked to find plenty of fans saying the same thing about these.
The point was to have a little fun with the idea of crossover jerseys while also exploring the option of a cool, unique retail item for the Bills and Sabres.
I tried to have at least one kit for each team that really hearkened back through the history of the franchise. For example, the two jerseys below draw from actual uniform features of both the Bills and Sabres. Others in the collection were just done for looks.
Please don’t be shy about sharing feedback. I’m hardly a master designer and whether you love these, hate these or otherwise, I’d like to hear it. If you have your own version to share by all means do so. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll see something like this on sale in the Bills or Sabres stores in the near future.
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