More than a year after announcing the finalists, German Bundesliga side Borussia Dortmund has finally announced the winner of their 2023-24 home kit contest.
The club announced the contest in early January 2022, and released a list of 10 finalists in late February 2022. The winning entry was submitted by Timo Ronge, a 44-year-old media designer from Marl, a town just northwest of Dortmund. The club said in its announcement that Ronge’s design had won the public vote “by a wide margin.”
The new home kit design a brush stroke silhouette of Borussia Dortmund’s home stadium, Signal Iduna Park, across the front of the yellow jersey. The sleeve cuffs and crew neck collar are black.
“A shirt should be striking, and it should be memorable,” Ronge says in a video on Borussia Dortmund’s website.
He goes on to explain that he wanted “a lot of black” in the design to help with the transition to the black shorts, and the diagonal lines across the front mirror those found in much of BVB’s corporate design, including their website and fan magazine.
The silhouette of the stadium is somewhat abstract, Ronge says, but it’s something fans can identify with. The texture of the artwork across the front of the shirt is meant to evoke the coal mining roots of the region around Dortmund — a theme BVB also played on for a special edition kit in 2023.
Ronge also said in the video that the idea for his kit came together pretty quickly in his head.
“Basically, I read about [the contest] online before lunch, I took my dogs for a walk at lunchtime, and I thought about what makes a shirt stand out, how I would design it and so on,” he said. “I have the advantage that I’m a digital and print media designer, so it wasn’t that hard to make my idea a reality. I immediately had an image in my mind, and straight away after lunch I produced the design.
“But I never thought I’d get this far. I knew that lots of people would probably enter the competition, and I had almost forgotten about it when I heard that I had made the shortlist.”
Borussia Dortmund plans to give fans “further insights into how the winning design became the official home jersey” on Monday, May 22. The kit will be available for purchase through team shops and their online shop starting on Friday, May 26.
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