The Nottingham Forest Garibaldi is one of the most distinctive shirts in English football, and one of the oldest stories behind any kit in the game. Forest have worn red since the club was founded in 1865, longer than almost anyone, and the name supporters give the shirt belongs not to a player, a manager or a sponsor but to an Italian revolutionary who never set foot in Nottingham. Here is how the Reds got their colour – and how they ended up handing it to Arsenal as well.
Nottingham Forest Garibaldi: who was Giuseppe Garibaldi?
Giuseppe Garibaldi was the soldier and nationalist who did more than anyone to force the unification of Italy in the middle of the 19th century. His volunteer army wore plain red shirts – the camicie rosse, the Redshirts – and the look became shorthand for the man and the cause.
By the 1860s he was a genuine celebrity in Britain. Garibaldi visited England in the spring of 1864 and was met by enormous crowds; for a period afterwards, red shirts, red caps and Garibaldi-branded merchandise were a minor craze in British towns and cities. Nottingham, a city with a long radical streak, was as taken with him as anywhere.
The meeting at the Clinton Arms in 1865
Forest were formed at the Clinton Arms on Shakespeare Street in 1865, when a group of men who had been playing shinty – a stick-and-ball game closer to hockey than football – decided to switch codes and form a football club instead.
Among the first pieces of business at that meeting was kit. The new club resolved to buy a set of a dozen tasselled caps in Garibaldi red, and the colour stuck. There was no marketing department, no colour palette and no focus group: a dozen red caps, bought because red was the colour of the moment, and a club identity that has survived 160 years and counting.
It is why the shirt is still called the Garibaldi today, and why the club, the local press and supporters use the phrase interchangeably with “the red”. Forest’s official club channels still reach for it whenever a new home kit is launched.
The red shirts Forest gave to Arsenal
The best-known consequence of that 1865 decision happened more than 20 years later, and 130 miles away.
In 1886 a group of workers at the Royal Arsenal munitions factory in Woolwich formed their own club. Two of them, goalkeeper Fred Beardsley and defender Morris Bates, were Nottingham men who had played for Forest before moving south for work. The new club had almost no equipment, so Beardsley wrote to his old club and asked for help. Forest sent down a set of red shirts and a ball.
Those shirts are the reason Arsenal play in red. The colour has been tweaked and the white sleeves added since, but the origin is a parcel posted from Nottingham. Forest have also been credited with helping to kit out other early clubs in the same way, which is a decent claim to fame for a side that began life as a group of shinty players in a pub.
Not just the colour: Forest’s other contributions
The Garibaldi is not the only thing the club gave the sport in its first half-century.
- Shin pads. Sam Weller Widdowson, a Forest forward and later club captain, is credited with inventing them in 1874 by cutting down a pair of cricket pads and strapping them to the outside of his socks. He was mocked for it. Every professional footballer in the world now wears a version of his idea.
- The crossbar and the referee’s whistle. Forest are among the clubs associated with the earliest use of both in competitive football in the 1870s, as the modern laws of the game took shape around them.
- The badge. The tree-and-river crest supporters know today dates from 1974, when the club ran a competition to redesign it. The tree is the forest; the wavy lines beneath it are the River Trent, which runs past the City Ground. The two stars above the crest were added for the two European Cups.
Why the Garibaldi still matters
Every club has a colour. Not every club has a colour that arrived by accident of fashion and then became the name of the shirt itself, used by supporters who mostly could not tell you a single fact about Italian unification.
That is the point. “The Garibaldi” is a word Forest fans own. It appears on flags on the Trent End, in the songs, in the way older supporters talk about players being “worthy of the shirt”. It belongs to the same family of Forest phrases as the Tricky Trees, and it carries a fair amount of weight: this is the shirt that was worn in Munich in 1979 and Madrid in 1980, the two nights that sit at the top of the club’s honours list.
It is also, deliberately, the one thing about Nottingham Forest that has not changed in a period of enormous change. The squad has been rebuilt almost from scratch across three summers, Oliver Glasner is in his first season as head coach after replacing Vítor Pereira in July, and the summer window brought in Liam Delap, Daniel Muñoz, Ousmane Diomande, Xaver Schlager and Steven Benda while a long list of familiar names left. The City Ground itself is heading for redevelopment.
The red stays. Nine managers, three divisions and a hundred transfer windows from now, whoever is running out at the City Ground will be running out in a colour chosen in a pub in 1865 because a soldier from Nice happened to be the most famous man in Europe. Glasner’s side are still chasing a first win of 2026/27 when Tottenham Hotspur visit on Saturday at 3pm – and they will do it in the Garibaldi, same as always.
