Why Do Atletico Madrid Wear Red and White Stripes? Three Stories

Atletico Madrid did not start out in red and white. For the first eight years of the club’s existence the players wore blue and white halved shirts, and the reason is the reason behind almost everything in the club’s early history: Madrid was a branch of somebody else’s football club.

Before the Stripes: Blue and White

The club was founded on 26 April 1903 as Athletic Club Sucursal de Madrid, literally the Madrid branch, by three Basque students living in the capital, who saw it as a youth offshoot of Athletic Bilbao. Branch clubs wore the parent club’s colours, and in 1903 Bilbao’s colours were blue and white halves. So that is what Madrid wore.

Bilbao changed first. By 1910 the Basque club had moved to red and white stripes. Madrid followed a year later, in 1911, and the two clubs have worn variations of the same design ever since. That much is not in dispute. What is disputed is why either of them made the switch, and the honest answer is that three separate explanations survive, none of them conclusively proven.

Story One: Juan Elorduy and the Southampton Shirts

The most detailed account, and the one Spanish-language sources give in the most specific terms, involves a shopping trip that went wrong.

Both clubs used to buy their kits in England, ordering Blackburn Rovers’ blue and white. In late 1909 Juan Elorduy, a former player and board member of Athletic Madrid, travelled to England to buy kits for both Bilbao and Madrid. He could not find Blackburn shirts to buy. Rather than return with nothing, he bought fifty red and white shirts belonging to Southampton instead.

The shirts then sat unused. The Spanish account places their rediscovery at a dinner between the Madrid and Bilbao players on 1 January 1911, where Elorduy remembered the stock he was still holding. The Madrid director Manuel Rodriguez Arzuaga agreed to buy them, and the team wore the colours in competition for the first time on 22 January 1911.

It is a good story, precise on dates and names, and it accounts neatly for both clubs changing within a year of each other. It does not, on its own, explain why Bilbao had already switched in 1910, before the dinner.

Story Two: The Cheapest Cloth in Madrid

The rival explanation is economic rather than accidental. Red and white striped cotton was the cheapest fabric of its kind available, because the same combination was woven as ticking, the heavy, tightly-woven cloth used to cover mattresses. Offcuts and unused lengths of ticking converted easily into football shirts, and a club with no money and eleven players to dress had an obvious reason to prefer it.

This version has an afterlife the Southampton story does not: it is the accepted origin of the club’s oldest nickname. Post-war Madrid mattresses were covered in exactly that red and white striped material, and the association gave the supporters the name colchoneros, the mattress-makers, which they still answer to. The nicknames page traces how that name and the others attached themselves.

Story Three: The Sunderland Claim

The third account is the newest. An investigation published in 2023 proposed that the shirts came not from Southampton but from Sunderland, whose team also wore red and white stripes at the time. It is a change of one detail rather than a rewrite, since the mechanism is the same and only the source club differs, but it is a reminder that the documentary trail from 1909 is thin enough that a century-old assumption can still be reopened.

The Detail That Settles Nothing But Explains Everything

There is one small piece of evidence that survives all three versions, and it is the shorts.

When the two clubs adopted the stripes, Madrid kept the blue shorts they had been wearing as a branch club. Bilbao switched to black. That divergence is why two teams in near-identical shirts have never actually looked alike on the pitch, and it is the clearest surviving trace of the moment the Madrid club stopped simply copying its parent and started making its own decisions. Full independence from Bilbao followed in 1921, a separation covered on the Athletic Bilbao connection page.

What a Supporter Should Take From This

Anyone looking for a single clean answer to why Atletico Madrid wear red and white will not find one, and the pages that offer one are choosing a story rather than reporting a record. What can be stated without hedging is narrow but solid: the club wore blue and white halves from 1903, the change to red and white stripes happened in 1911, Bilbao made the same change in 1910, Madrid kept blue shorts while Bilbao took black, and the mattress-ticking association is old enough and strong enough to have produced a nickname that outlived every explanation of the shirts themselves.

The rest is three plausible accounts of the same year, and the club’s own history is more interesting for having kept all three.

What colours did Atletico Madrid wear before red and white?

Blue and white halved shirts, from the club's founding in 1903 until 1911. Those were the colours of Athletic Bilbao at the time, and the Madrid club was founded as a branch of Bilbao, so it wore the parent club's kit.

What year did Atletico Madrid adopt red and white stripes?

1911. Athletic Bilbao had already changed to red and white stripes by 1910. Spanish sources date Madrid's first competitive appearance in the new colours to 22 January 1911.

Did the red and white shirts really come from Southampton?

That is the most commonly repeated account: Juan Elorduy travelled to England in late 1909 to buy Blackburn Rovers kits, could not find them, and bought fifty Southampton shirts instead. A 2023 investigation proposed Sunderland as the source instead. Neither version is conclusively settled.

Why are Atletico Madrid called the mattress-makers?

Because red and white striped cloth was used as mattress ticking in post-war Madrid, and the shirts looked like the mattresses. The nickname colchoneros comes directly from that resemblance, and it is also the basis of the theory that the club chose the colours because the cloth was cheap.

Why do Atletico Madrid and Athletic Bilbao wear the same colours?

Because Atletico began in 1903 as a Madrid branch of Athletic Bilbao and wore the parent club's colours. Both clubs changed to red and white stripes at the turn of the 1910s and never changed back. The shorts are the giveaway: Madrid kept blue, Bilbao went to black.