A tannery, a bishop and a new name.

Mitre began in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 1817, when Benjamin Crook opened a tannery there and gave it his own name. A National Football Museum story published in April 2025 says the business initially produced leather goods before turning to sporting equipment and apparel, and that it was more than a century before it became Mitre. The museum says the tannery began in the town centre and that Crook later moved his base about half a mile north to the suburb of Birkby; a 2015 article in the Huddersfield Examiner names the premises there as Bay Hall, where the company stayed for many decades.

The name arrived in 1949. According to the National Football Museum, Crook’s successors renamed the company Mitre that year, in homage to the founder’s firm friendship with a local bishop. English Wikipedia adds that the word refers to the ceremonial head-dress worn by bishops, which Crook took as the name for his company. The Huddersfield Examiner describes the renamed business producing footballs and rugby balls for clubs around the world.

The range widened soon after. The Examiner reported in 2015 that Mitre moved into cricket, soft leather goods and bags in 1959, and that sports footwear followed a year later. The National Football Museum says that in the late 1950s Mitre released balls and shin pads endorsed by the England forward Tom Finney, and that in 1964 Denis Law, the Manchester United player who had begun his professional career at Huddersfield Town, became an official Mitre spokesperson.

Football’s governing body soon followed. The museum says that two years after Law’s signing, in 1966, The Football Association chose Mitre as its official ball supplier. An unbranded orange variant was used in that year’s FA Cup Final between Everton and Sheffield Wednesday, though a Slazenger orange ball, chosen in a blind test at the FA’s Soho headquarters, was used at the World Cup that summer.

Cup finals, leagues and a new owner.

The National Football Museum says Mitre balls were used at FA Cup Finals for decades, and that from 1976 the company was also official ball supplier to the Football League. It sponsored the Women’s FA Cup, named the Mitre Challenge Trophy, from its start in 1970 until 1976, and in that era produced the 25-panel Max ball.

Other sports carried the name too. English Wikipedia, citing The Irish Times, records Mitre as official ball supplier to the 1987 Rugby World Cup, jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand, and, citing SportCal, says a Mitre ball was used at the 2003 Netball World Championships in Jamaica, where the England team also wore Mitre apparel.

Ownership changed in the mid-1990s. The Irish Times reported on 7 September 1996 that the half-year results of Pentland, the sportswear group that owns Speedo, had been affected by losses at “the newly-acquired Mitre football company”. Pentland Brands still lists Mitre among its brands, and English Wikipedia describes Mitre Sports International as a subsidiary of the family-owned Pentland Group, based in Wakefield.

The 1990s and 2000s brought both new deals and losses. The National Football Museum says Mitre made the balls for the opening seasons of the Premier League — Wikipedia dates this to 1992 and says the balls were synthetic rather than leather — before Nike replaced it as Premier League supplier in 2000, and that it lost its place as the FA’s preferred partner in 2006. It remained ball supplier to the English Football League until 2021, the museum says, and its balls have since returned to the FA Cup.

Abroad, English Wikipedia records Mitre kit deals with several Argentine Primera División clubs from 2000, an agreement in 2008 to supply the El Salvador national team’s kit, and a 2016 deal as official match ball sponsor for the Singapore Professional Football League. In 2015 the Huddersfield Examiner reported a renewed Football League partnership built around the Delta Hyperseam ball, quoting managing director Jon Godden on a long-running relationship.

Design and documentation.

Protective and playing equipment gives a logo very little room and a great deal to compete with. A helmet is curved in two directions, carries vents, clips and face guards, and may also have to hold a team’s own crest, numbers and stripes. A stick or shaft is long and narrow, so a name usually runs along its length and is read sideways, often from across a field or a rink. A skate boot offers a heel, a tongue and a quarter panel, each seen from a different angle, while a ball is round, scuffed and spinning, and its print is broken up by panels and seams.

Brands working on these surfaces tend to lean on a short word or a simple symbol that survives being stretched, shrunk, repeated or partly hidden. Colour matters too: a mark has to read against team colours it does not control, under floodlights and on television.

Each guide that follows sets out who started the brand, who has owned it since, and how its name and mark have appeared on equipment, separating what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

A bishop’s hat, a ball and a run of chevrons.

Mitre’s name is unusual among sports brands because it points to neither a founder nor a sport. It was chosen in 1949, more than a century after Benjamin Crook opened his tannery, and the National Football Museum ties it to Crook’s friendship with a local bishop. English Wikipedia links it directly to the bishop’s ceremonial head-dress, the mitre, so the brand name is drawn from an object with a clear and recognisable outline.

A second mark sits on the ball itself. The National Football Museum says that in the 1980s Mitre created the Delta ball, and that its chevrons became the company’s distinctive trademark, still featuring on its footballs today. The museum’s own example, from The Players Foundation Collection, is a Delta thought to date from the 1980s. Wikipedia records that Mitre brought the Delta design back as the official match ball of the English Football League from the 2017–18 season, unveiling it on Soccer AM and at Wembley Stadium under the campaign name “Legend Returns”.

The ball designs have changed around those chevrons. The museum names the 25-panel Max and the Ultimax alongside the Delta, and Wikipedia describes the 2007 Revolve ball, supplied to the Football League so that each club played with a ball in its own colours and badge, and the 2015 Hyperseam range used in the Football League and the Scottish Premier League.

For a design guide, Mitre shows how a name taken from a bishop’s hat and a pattern of chevrons on a ball can carry a Huddersfield tannery through new owners, new materials and two centuries of change. Compare it with Slazenger, whose orange ball was used at the 1966 World Cup, and Nike, which succeeded Mitre as Premier League ball supplier in 2000. For this guide we use pitch green, chevron red and ball white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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