By Callum Fraser 
The first international football match was played on 30 November 1872 at Hamilton Crescent in Partick, between Scotland and England, and ended 0-0. Scotland wore dark blue, the colours of Queen’s Park, who supplied the entire team; England wore white. Neither has changed since. Every other rivalry in the game has a shirt story attached to it, but this one has the original: white against dark blue, for 154 years. This is the story of the england football kit and its oldest opponent, from the Wembley Wizards to 1967, 1977 and a summer in which the two nations had very different World Cups.
1872: the colours are set
Scotland’s dark blue came from Queen’s Park, the amateur club that provided every player for the first match and most of them for the next decade. England’s white was chosen by the Football Association with no particular reasoning that has survived, beyond the fact that white was cheap and clean. The two teams played each other every year from 1872, usually as the last match of the season, and for the first fifty years the fixture was the biggest in the world. The shirts became, in effect, the templates for every national kit that followed.
1928: the Wembley Wizards
The rivalry’s most famous Scottish afternoon came at Wembley in March 1928, when a Scotland side with a forward line averaging five foot six beat England 5-1 in the rain. Alex Jackson scored a hat-trick and Alex James, soon to be Arsenal’s playmaker, scored two, and the team was christened the Wembley Wizards. Scotland wore dark blue with white shorts; England wore white with navy shorts. The shirts of that day were heavy cotton with lace-up collars, and both associations have reissued them.
1961 and 1967: the swing
England’s biggest win in the fixture came in 1961, 9-3 at Wembley, a match that ended the international career of the Scotland goalkeeper Frank Haffey. Six years later Scotland took their revenge. In April 1967, at the same ground, Scotland beat the world champions 3-2, Jim Baxter juggling the ball on the touchline while England chased it, and declared themselves unofficial world champions. England wore the white of 1966, the shirt of Hurst’s hat-trick, and lost in it.
1977: the crossbar
The fixture’s most notorious afternoon was June 1977, when Scotland won 2-1 at Wembley and the Tartan Army invaded the pitch, tore up turf and broke the crossbar. England wore the Admiral shirt of the era with its red and blue sleeve stripes; Scotland wore an Umbro dark blue with a white collar. The pictures of supporters swinging from the goal frame ended the annual fixture within a few years, and the Home Championship itself was abolished in 1984.
Euro 96 and after
The 1996 European Championship meeting at Wembley produced Paul Gascoigne’s goal, the flick over Colin Hendry and the volley, and the “dentist’s chair” celebration, in an Umbro England shirt that has become one of the most collected of the decade. Scotland wore an Umbro dark blue with a purple diagonal pattern. The two met again in a play-off for Euro 2000, Scotland winning 1-0 at Wembley but losing on aggregate, and at Euro 2020, a 0-0 draw that suited Scotland more than England. The 150th anniversary friendly at Hampden in 2024, won 3-1 by England, was played in shirts designed to echo 1872.
2026: two kits, two tournaments
For the 2026 World Cup Nike gave England a white home shirt with a woven pattern of lions and stars, navy and red accents and a crew neck in the style of the 2000 design, and a red away shirt paired with navy shorts. Nike framed the collection as capturing the mood of the nation, familiar yet newly assertive, and reviewers agreed it was the most confident England kit in years. Scotland, with adidas, wore the dark blue they have always worn, with a white collar and the Saltire in the design.
The tournaments diverged sharply. Scotland, at a World Cup for the first time in 28 years, beat Haiti 1-0, lost to Morocco and Brazil and went out in the group, after which Steve Clarke resigned. England, under Thomas Tuchel, won their group, lost a semi-final to Argentina and then beat France 6-4 in the third-place match, Bukayo Saka scoring a hat-trick, for their best finish since 1966. Spain won the tournament. For the first time in a generation both nations had been at the same World Cup, and the white shirt went home with a medal.
Hampden and Wembley
The fixture built two stadiums. Hampden Park, opened in 1903, held the world record attendance for a football match for decades, 149,415 for the 1937 meeting with England, a figure that will never be approached again in Britain. Wembley, opened in 1923, staged the fixture from 1924 and became the Tartan Army’s biennial destination, the invasions of 1977 and the good behaviour of later years both part of the folklore. The two grounds are the backdrops to almost every famous image of the rivalry, and the two shirts look different in each: dark blue under Hampden’s low light, white against Wembley’s old terraces.
The badges
England’s crest is the three lions of the royal arms with ten Tudor roses. Scotland’s is the lion rampant of the royal standard of Scotland, surrounded by thistles, and the Scottish FA’s version has changed shape more often than England’s over the years. Both badges are older than almost any club crest in the game, and both associations have resisted the modern habit of redrawing them for each new manufacturer.
The women’s fixture
The women’s teams have played each other since 1972, and the 2019 World Cup meeting in Nice, won 2-1 by England, was the first between the two at a major tournament. Scotland’s women wore the same dark blue as the men; England’s wore white. The fixture has none of the men’s hostility and all of its history, and it is likely to be played more often than the men’s version in the years ahead.
Why the shirts still matter
The England and Scotland kits are the only two national shirts in the world that have never changed their base colour, and the reason is the same for both: the rivalry. Neither association could put its team in a different colour against the other without it being read as surrender. The Scots in dark blue and the English in white is the fixture’s identity, and as long as the two keep meeting, at Hampden every few years and at the occasional tournament, the shirts will keep looking the way they did in a Partick cricket ground in 1872. For more on Scotland’s players, the national team and the rivalry that started it all, explore Scots Abroad Pod.