NZ Football said it to fool us, but the joke’s on them – it’s actually a good idea.

A new genre of April Fool’s prank has taken hold on social media in recent years, where brands announce a new product or innovation “as a joke” when in fact it’s really a good idea they’re too cowardly to act on. Who wouldn’t want to eat a Subway meatball pie, ride an underground train line from Dunedin to Mosgiel or chug a melatonin-infused Night V before bed? 

The All Whites and NZ Football accounts’ posts on the morning of April 1 fell into this category, putting out into the universe something I probably wasn’t alone in thinking at Eden Park last Monday night: that New Zealand’s national football teams should rebrand, or at least debrand, and start playing in black.

“Effective immediately, the team will be known as ‘The All Black Team’,” the post’s tongue-in-cheek caption read. “The updated name reflects a modern, dynamic direction for New Zealand’s national men’s side… New Zealand Football sees no conflict with the introduction of this name within the existing sporting landscape, and believes it creates a clear opportunity to establish a strong presence in a largely uncontested space.”

Name aside, everything else about this corporately-worded joke actually made a lot of sense.

We don’t need to get Bodo Lang on the blower to know that from a branding perspective, black is synonymous with New Zealand sports teams. Pretty much every national team wears it – including the New Zealand men’s football team when they played their first international in 1922.

The main reason they broke from tradition and started wearing white in the first place seems to be because for much of the 20th century black kits were reserved for referees. These days refs have a dazzling array of neons to choose from, and many teams wear black alternate kits. But the dye has been set – there are basically no club or international teams with a traditional black home kit, while hundreds play in white. On the world stage, reverting to black would provide us with what marketing types call a “point of difference”.

Quietly backing away from the All Whites moniker would have its advantages too. “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”, the saying goes, and the thousands of supporters heading to the US and Canada for the World Cup in June are sure to lose a lot of time and dignity explaining to locals that the team name “All Whites” is not racist but in fact a clever reference to New Zealand’s famous rugby team, the All Blacks (also not racist).

It may be tempting to leap to the defence of the All Whites’ nickname by saying it’s clearly from a different time and that we would have never even considered the racial overtones back then. But really, the name dates back to the team’s qualifying campaign for the 1982 World Cup, which happened to coincide with the 1981 Springbok Tour – the supporters’ song that helped coin the name was checked by the race relations office to make sure it wasn’t a secret pro-apartheid anthem.

And anyway, the New Zealand bowls team got there first. They adopted the All Whites nickname on their 1906 tour of Australia, proving the urge to make every national sports team name a self-effacing derivative of the All Blacks (or Silver Ferns for women’s teams) has been there from the start. It’s painted us into a deeply embarrassing corner from which we must now face the world as a nation of “Tall Blacks” and “All Whites”, to say nothing of our short-lived but long-remembered badminton team name.

Perhaps the most compelling argument of all, though, is the simple fact that black just looks better. Supporters got a first-hand preview of both new World Cup kits during the international break, playing in the traditional white home kit vs Finland (dispiriting loss) and in the black away kit vs Chile (rousing win). The white kit, with a cloud-inspired pattern that makes it look like it’s been washed with a new pair of jeans, looked… OK. But the black kit, with its shimmering fern pattern and 90s-inspired silver numbering, looked spectacular, easily among the best New Zealand kits we’ve seen in any sport for years. 

Wearing it for the first time clearly instilled the team with a sense of mana New Zealand athletes can only get from pulling on a black uniform. Why deprive them of that for the sake of an unoriginal brand name with less than half a century of tradition?