German footballl club shirts

It's partly for the TV so that the 2 teams are really distinguishable from each other (this happens champions league sometimes) and also so they can sell more replica kits from their store.
No-one's going to buy a kit if they haven't seen their heroes wearing it.

You could have picked a better English club in your original post... 

I'm guessing it's just simply that the clubs wanted to change it, as I don't see a pattern in how, or when, they swap the colours between the Home and Away when I look up the teams kit history.

It'll be interesting if there's more to it, but I don't think there is.

He is asking specifically why some teams have flipped their Home&Away shirts, essentially.

You'll never see Ipswich have a home shirt not blue!
(Although Roy Keane tried to change it to red)


It's probably still for $$$ somehow.

One thing you also need to consider is that kit manufacturers pay the club a massive amount of money to be their chosen brand. So it's sort of inevitable that the clubs bow to the person with all the cash.
Some teams won't play that game though. Dortmund are a good example I think.
They have their "yellow wall" at the Westfalenstadion & I don't think they've changed their basic home strip scheme for decades. It's like their brand.

You are right, steve, about the manufacturers paying the club to wear their brand, and your example of Borussia Dortmund is exactly what I meant, with their famous 'yellow wall'. There is no debate about their home kit colour.
Like Liverpool and Man Utd play in red (the reds and the red devils), St Etienne in France and the famous green shirt, the canaries from Nantes... That's the point.

I too like wilgy have seen often a club at home playing with their away or third kit, to promote and sell more of these jerseys...
But that's a different thing.

As Bluehughes shows with the picture, (I refer to the same website, and also oldfootballshirts and others, and also official club sites), some german clubs really completly swap their home and away club colours. Like leverkusen on year their home shirt is black, and the away shirt is red, the next year their home shirt is red, the away shirt is black. It's really a swap ofcolour kits and it's particularly true to this country.