HANDS up if you knew that New York had an opera house.

Enfield, put your hand down - you don't even work here anymore...  Yes kids, New York has an opera house that, in the inimitable style of the north-eastern USA, is called The Metropolitan Opera.

The Metropolitan Opera building is about as interesting as its name suggests. Indeed the bloke who designed the thing probably named it.  Architect Kenneth Harrison is apparently known for "straightforward planning and sensible functionalism", which is a polite way of saying that Kenny was the sort of bloke who thought that arches were interesting, 2,000 years after they actually were.  It is, of course, a perfectly serviceable opera house. It just looks better at night... with the lights turned off.

Apple's Steve Jobs once remarked that people don't know what they want until you give it to them. Jobs was talking about the problems of designing by committee.  Apple's entire business is good design.  Good design is immensely important in today's market.

Sydney FC learned the value of good design this week - the hard way.

Reaction to the release of the new home strip ran from boredom to outright hatred.   I'm in the former camp.  It looks like a jersey designed by a committee of Kennys, inspired by "straightforward planning and sensible functionalism". 

Unless we win the title in it, the jersey is destined for obscurity.  Which is a new twist on players fighting for the jersey...

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For all I would have known, I would have said that Sydney FC's design mistakes were all their own - and they may be.  Perth Glory, on the other hand, have gone public with their battle with the FFA over the design of their jersey.

New owner Tony Sage described the process of redesigning the Perth jersey as follows: "... the styles that we got given were horrendous, different colours - and so we just stuck to our guns and in the end, we came up with a compromise I think everyone's happy with."

I think Perth have come up with one of the best jerseys to grace Australian football.

But the idea that the FFA's "assistance" to clubs it doesn't own must extend to a drawn out argument about jersey design, is ludicrous.   After all, this is the same organization that saw a symbol that "represents the sun, earth and desert, whilst the centre glow depicts the spring and summer playing season", when everyone else saw an angry orange blobby thing. (Steady now - the designer of that is a personal friend of mine and I like it. And so did Basketball Australia, by the look of things - KA)

This is the organization that initially thought that its target market for jersey sales was Star Trek fans.  The very same organization that bought the line that the trophy  "embodies a laurel wreath", when everyone else immediately thought "it's a silver dunny seat".  Based on that track record alone, one would have to say that the FFA's qualifications to dictate jersey design are tenuous at best. 

While people might not know what they want until you give it to them, they know exactly what they don't want when it is forced upon them.   I'm not sure if the FFA were behind the fiasco that is the Sydney FC home strip (though I cannot imagine that the "assistance" was limited to Perth), but hopefully everyone involved will have learned a lesson from both the poor reception to the Sydney strip and the good reception to the Perth one.

The FFA should now hand these sort of matters over to the clubs and their fans.

*with apologies to TISM.