What’s So Special About Messi’s 2011/12 Barcelona Away Shirt?

By 2011, there was little left for Lionel Messi to prove. Yet somehow, he was still getting better.

Barcelona entered the 2011/12 season as champions of both Spain and Europe, with Pep Guardiola’s side already established as one of the defining teams of its generation. Messi was at the centre of it all.

What followed was the most prolific season of his Barcelona career — accompanied by one of the club’s most distinctive away shirts.

Shirts like this are part of what makes vintage football shirts so closely connected to particular players, seasons and moments.

Messi at his most prolific

Messi made 60 appearances for Barcelona in 2011/12 and scored 73 goals, a club-season total he never surpassed. Fifty came in La Liga alone.

It was an extraordinary individual season at the end of an extraordinary period for Barcelona. Guardiola would leave the club that summer, bringing his four-year spell as first-team coach to a close.

A different kind of Barça

For much of the preceding decade, Barcelona’s away shirts had provided Nike with room to experiment with colour. Bright yellow, orange, turquoise and green had all appeared.

For 2011/12, the direction changed completely.

Barcelona stepped onto the pitch in an almost entirely black change kit, with the colour interrupted by the club crest, yellow Nike branding and Qatar Foundation sponsor.

The effect was dramatically different from the colourful shirts that had preceded it.

Barça, in black

What makes the 2011/12 shirt particularly interesting in retrospect is what happened afterwards.

Black returned as a Barcelona kit colour in 2013/14 and again in 2020/21. When Nike unveiled another black away shirt for the club’s 125th-anniversary season in 2024/25, Barcelona described it as only the fourth time the club had worn a black shirt — tracing that sequence back to 2011/12.

More than just a black Barcelona shirt

And that is what brings the different parts of the story together.

The 2011/12 away shirt introduced a look Barcelona would return to repeatedly. But the player most closely associated with that first black kit was simultaneously producing the most prolific season of his career.

Add Messi’s number 10 in yellow across the back and the shirt becomes tied to a very specific moment in Barcelona history: Guardiola’s final season and Messi at his statistical peak.

Discover more football shirts

From Barcelona and Messi to shirts from clubs and national teams across different eras, explore our collection of authentic football shirts.

Explore the football shirt collection.