“Cantiamo solo quando peschiamo.”

That’s a direct translation of one of Grimsby Town’s most coveted chants: “We only sing when we’re fishing.”

Everything sounds better in Italian but, as this League Two side from Lincolnshire, halfway up the east coast of England near the River Humber, have discovered, everything looks better in Italian, too.

Grimsby is most famous for its fishing industry, processing around 70 per cent of the UK’s seafood; hence the tongue-in-cheek song sung by its football team’s supporters, a chant they made their own after a version was initially aimed at them by Liverpool fans during a match at Anfield in 1980.

Now, Grimsby Town are turning heads for their fashion sense, having trawled through their archives for inspiration and re-collaborated with an Italian sportswear company to produce some of the standout football jerseys for next season.

“We should be unapologetically Grimsby, because we can’t be anyone else,” Jack Johnson, the fourth-division side’s head of marketing, tells The Athletic. “We didn’t want to just go down the off-the-shelf strategy. We wanted something that was going to offer storytelling. That’s what makes us, and this kit, unique.”

It’s a modern take on an all-time classic.

When they play away this season, starting at Walsall on August 22, Grimsby will regularly step on to the pitch looking like Milan from the 1990s — but also themselves from that same period.

In 1996, Grimsby linked up with Italian sportswear company Lotto for two seasons; their away shirt for 1996-97 was a carbon copy of Milan’s light-blue fourth kit from the previous campaign, down to the slim red-and-black band across the chest with a white-and-blue diamond pattern beneath. If you removed the Milan badge and sponsor’s logo, and added Grimsby’s equivalents, you had the finished product.

Milan never actually wore that kit in Serie A, leaving Grimsby to give a soon-to-be-underused Lotto design a second premiere. And now football fans have fallen in love with a modern reimagining.

(Jon Corken/Grimsby Town Football Club)

“It felt really cool that we had exactly the same strip as the Milan,” remembers Steve Young of Grimsby Town podcast View From The Findus. And despite the club’s relegation from the First Division, then English football’s second tier, that season, “It became one of those shirts people always remembered.”

It was around this time that Grimsby forged a broader Italian affinity.

In 1995, they signed former Ivano Bonetti, a two-time Serie A winner with Juventus and Sampdoria, two years before the town produced more pizzas than anywhere in Europe, including its homeland of Italy.

These quirks, and more, are paid homage to in the new away shirt’s unveiling video released on July 13, which drew nearly 800,000 views on X within a week.

It was filmed in Naples, a city with fish markets of its own and a working-class atmosphere that perfectly illustrated the parallel with Grimsby.

🇮🇹 Grimsby – inspired by Italian culture since 1878.

Introducing our 2026/27 Away Kit. Available in-store Friday and online from Monday.#GTFC pic.twitter.com/aWTNvLDr4F

— Grimsby Town F.C. (@officialgtfc) July 13, 2026

First-team players Cameron McJannet and Geza David Turi were flown out to model the outfit on the streets of Naples, the latter unexpectedly so, just a day after representing the Faroe Islands in their June internationals against Estonia and Latvia. Turi’s modelling of the shirt’s long-sleeved edition have been received so well that the club are currently out of stock and won’t have more until September.

“When you set the long-sleeve shirts with the backdrop of Italy and you’ve got random Italians on mopeds wearing it, it just looks very cool, and is extremely well thought of,“ Young says.

(Jon Corken/Grimsby Town Football Club)

The partnership with Lotto stems from Grimsby’s primary deal with KitLocker, which adopted a licensing branch four years ago to design bespoke, heritage-led kits alongside suppliers and clubs.

This season is the third year of Grimsby’s KitLocker collaboration. Their partnership, in conjunction with Umbro for its first two years, broke records last season as their away shirt — again inspired by a design from the 1990s — became the best-selling in club history, with over 10,000 sold, a figure greater than their Blundell Park stadium’s capacity.

Lotto then began a partnership with KitLocker last season, manufacturing League One side AFC Wimbledon’s kits, and getting into business with Grimsby felt like a natural progression.

“When the Lotto link came about, remaking the ’96 kit immediately sprang to mind,” Johnson says. “We didn’t want to mess with a classic, because this kit was synonymous with the Milan side containing Patrick Vieira and Roberto Baggio, and brings back warm memories for fans of my age and older.”

Roberto Baggio, left, and George Weah in action in Milan’s 1995-96 fourth kit (Getty Images)

There is a lot going on visually, and a kit incorporating a collar, pinstripes, diamonds and five shades of blue sounds too busy to work, but it does — gloriously so.

“Grimsby is a club we knew would respect the heritage of Lotto,” says Mike Atkin, KitLocker’s director of licensed brands. “We knew the away kit would be a hit, but the work has gone in across the board to ensure that every shirt tells a story.”

The new home shirt — Grimsby have played in black and white stripes since 1925 — similarly pays tribute to its Lotto-made equivalent from 30 years ago with a retro Juventus-esque look, while their training and goalkeeper kits feature landmarks and mythology connected with the origins of the town.

(Yuta Kato/Grimsby Town Football Club)

Johnson and KitLocker worked closely with JD Sports’ product director Luke Matthews, who aided the process on an advisory basis, and local photographer James Willis to bring the project to life. “Being a part of making these love letters of Grimsby that have transcended beyond the borders of Lincolnshire is awesome,” says Matthews.

It’s something Young, now living 60 miles away in Leeds, has also experienced: “I’ve had people who I play five-a-side with, many of whom only know Grimsby exists because of me, message me saying how amazing our kits look.

“Lotto feels like the quintessential Grimsby sponsor, and brings back memories of the season after we got relegated, where we visited Wembley twice (winning both the EFL Trophy and the Second Division play-off final) — the best times many of us have seen.”

On the face of it, Grimsby and Italian football should have little in common. Yet one borrowed template from the 1990s has become part of the club’s own identity, revived now not out of nostalgia alone but because it still tells the town’s story.

LAKE FOREST, Ill. — In retrospect, I should’ve gone to the Cubs reunion at the Chicago Theatre on Thursday night.

“The Lovable Reunion” podcast live taping had a full house of hooting fans, several 2016 Cubs on stage, Pete Crow-Armstrong in the audience and an impromptu performance from Eddie Vedder.

But instead I drove up to Lake Forest and saw “Talking Football with Kevin Warren” at Gorton Center, a community arts venue five miles east of Halas Hall. Warren’s event had about 75 well-mannered people, including Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey, who sat in the front row.

I have been to Gorton Center’s John & Nancy Hughes Theater several times over the years to see my daughter in various plays. Those performances drew much bigger crowds.

Then again, at least this talk didn’t get canceled. Many years ago, Warren’s predecessor as president of the Bears, Ted Phillips, was scheduled for a “Lunch with a Legend” interview series show with ESPN 1000, but it was called off because of low ticket sales.

Thursday night was a conversation with writer David Sweet, an affable man who wasn’t going to test Warren’s nerve by asking him hard-boiled questions about the seemingly never-ending pursuit of a new stadium for the Bears. I hoped for some spirited questions from frustrated Bears fans, but I left disappointed.

I skipped living in the Cubs’ past to see whether Warren had any clarity on the Bears’ future home in Arlington Heights, Ill., or Hammond, Ind. Warren hasn’t talked to reporters in a bit, and the Bears are waiting on Illinois politicians while seriously looking into moving the pride and joy of the state to Indiana.

Sweet did ask about the state of this debacle, but all Warren said was the Bears have spent the six weeks since their June 4 declaration focused on Hammond doing “due diligence” and environmental studies. He reiterated the team needs tax certainty, committed infrastructure money and “really good partners” for a new stadium project.

Sweet mentioned Arlington Heights in his question, but Warren, showing message discipline, did not.

“It’s been a challenge, but they’re all a challenge. U.S. Bank (Stadium in Minneapolis) was a challenge,” Warren said at one point. “It’s our job to continually stay positive.”

I thought there might be a live Q&A, but instead ticket purchasers could write out questions. Sweet read seven of them. None that were picked were direct questions about the stadium process, and two were nonsensical. (Of the latter, one read: “My wife is 5 feet, 110 pounds. Can she be a pass rusher?” Warren gamely attempted an answer.)

Two questions came from the caustic keyboard of Tim Boyd of Palatine, Ill., a Bears fan who attends a handful of home games and at least one road game per season. He showed me an email he sent with a list of stadium-related queries, many of which were admittedly rude, pointed or unlikely to be picked.

One of his questions that got asked was about Warren’s feelings on turf versus grass, considering he is dead set on building a stadium with a fixed roof. The other insinuated that Warren is not a real Bears fan, though Sweet didn’t read it that way. For the former, he said … basically nothing. They’d study the issue.

Boyd came to the event with his friend Jake Butman from Highland Park, Ill. They buy tickets every year through a season ticket holder and are disenchanted with Warren’s leadership on the stadium situation. So needless to say, they were not impressed with the event. Though, to be fair, it was planned by Gorton Center, not the Bears and Warren.

“I don’t even know why he did this, actually,” Butman said. “I would love to give him a truth serum and be like, ‘What was the purpose of this whole thing?’ Because it felt like such a softball, comfy, cozy situation.”

Because this was a conversation with a famous person type of event, a good chunk of time was spent talking about Warren’s background. For instance, he explained why he is obsessed with building things. (Warren has talked adoringly about seeing cranes in the sky.) He said it stemmed from his days growing up in Phoenix. First, he was a paperboy, and he liked looking at the different houses on his route. And during college, he worked summers in construction, where he learned about preparation, teamwork, etc.

Warren said U.S. Bank Stadium came in under budget and that he’s “neurotic about numbers.” Good news, I suppose, if the Bears ever start building a stadium.

One thing that bothered Boyd and Butman was Warren saying that his main focus is doing right by the fans. While they don’t think the Bears end up in Indiana, the two find the entire song-and-dance insulting.

“(The northern suburbs) to out west is all your season ticket holders,” Butman said. “If you care about them, why are you going to Indiana?”

While Boyd lives close to the Arlington Heights project, he said he’s not only grown tired of the rhetoric, but he also doesn’t trust the Bears to follow through on their promises to build a “world-class” stadium. Boyd, a bit of a pessimist, expects the worst if it gets done at all and said that at this point, he’d rather see the team fix Soldier Field.

Training camp starts in two weeks, when the focus will shift to Caleb Williams and Super Bowl dreams.

When asked about general manager Ryan Poles and coach Ben Johnson, Warren said he told them that they remind him of songwriters Hal David and Burt Bacharach. Warren said Poles and Johnson were understandably confused about the outdated reference.

“I told them to keep putting out the hits,” Warren said.

Those two almost found the way to Santa Clara, which is close to San Jose, so I get it. But what the Bears world needs now is more than love — they need results.

From Warren to Williams, the Bears have a lot of work to do to reach their lofty goals. The players and coaches need to build on last year’s success, and Warren needs to erase his years of failure. Easier said than done on both accounts.

At the end of the conversation, Sweet asked Warren what he is looking forward to this season.

“I’d say I’m most excited about starting 0-0 and figuring out how to win again,” Warren said.