This Christmas, the three wise men are coming early.

For quite a while, the idea of having a DesignFootball.com podcast has been thrown around, with other commitments stopping the project getting underway, and with the fantastic, and now sadly discontinued, Football Attic picking up the slack with some wonderful kit-centric offerings of their own. Finally, with TFA returning to us that void, we're making it happen.

And by that we mean, very last minute gift guide. Yeah, you're gonna need to go out to the shops yourself - urgh! How uncouth! - or pay top dollar for the superfast delivery service (they charge a lot, right?), and in some cases this'll be entirely impossible, unless you do presents at New Year or Epiphany or some such.

Anyway, here are some ideas of what you can get your loved ones, or maybe still instruct your loved ones to buy you - don't delay!

It was with ironic contrast that news - however reliable - reached us around this time last year, that Umbro had entered a bidding war to snare the prized Manchester United contract, then held by Umbro's former owners, Nike.  It didn't happen in the end - adidas will take over in the summer - but reports seemed to give Iconix's British-based brand a fighting chance, which flew in the face of generally accepted progress.

Because Umbro were no longer the benchmark.  This isn't simply about their loss of major contracts to Nike - Manchester City, England - though that played a part, more that their stylings, or eschewing of stylings, were no longer as revered by the rest of the kit design industry.

Arsenal Football Club. For some, "The Pride of (North) London", for others a band of vagabonds mutated into a corporate behemoth with business savvy the likes of Manchester United and Real Madrid can but dream of.

And this is Arsenal.  The anachronism.  I won't bore you with an analysis of their idiosyncratic juxtaposition of tradition with forward-thinking marketing nous; I will instead bore you with an attempt to tear apart one of their most treasured kit traditions: The Sleeve Rule™.

So is it acceptable to wear a football shirt/kit?  A form of this question has been asked this week, and answered, in a manner of speaking, by Guardian fashion journalist Hadley Freeman (me neither).  The World Cup's on - it's silly season, where mainstream journalists talk rubbish about something they know nothing about.

Ms Freeman actually starts out ok, identifying that the wearing of football shirts is often (nay, generally) to denote affiliation or leaning.  Yes, it can be used to create a sense of community, Hadley, but also to differentiate oneself from others.

There is an idea which occasionally surfaces in the music world that whilst the possibilities in songwriting are supposedly endless, limitless and infinite, the great melodies and chord progressions have been used at some point already, and any hit - particularly of guitar-driven genres - will borrow from a predecessor.

This isn't necessarily to suggest plagiarism, certainly not always intentional borrowing from previous songs, but perhaps the melody which comes to a composer in a dream is not constructed in the unconscious mind, rather the emergence of a distant memory unfamiliar to the owner.