Today the FIFA World Cup is an ultra organized, meticulous and error-free event. Practically everything is run with the precision of a Swiss watch, but it wasn't always like that. There was a time when the event didn't have the dimension it has today, or the amount of money involved, so it wasn't uncommon for organizational mistakes to happen that today are unimaginable.
One particular mistake that used to give fans a quaint experience was national teams playing official World Cup matches with borrowed club kits. Believe it or not this happened four different times, in four different World Cups.
Chronologically this first time this happened was in the 1934 World Cup in Italy. Austria's "Wunderteam" would play the 3rd place match against Germany in the city of Naples but they had both brought white jerseys with no second option. Austria ended up losing a coin toss and used Napoli's traditional light blue home jersey instead. Germany took the bronze medal after a 3-2 win.
Sixteen years later in the 1950 World Cup in Brazil it was Mexico's turn. In the city of Porto Alegre Mexico's burgundy jerseys were too similar to Switzerland's red kits. Luckily local club Cruzeiro (not to be confused with the more important Cruzeiro from Belo Horizonte) came to the rescue and lent Mexico their blue and white striped jerseys.
The third time this happened was in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. This time it was Argentina's blue and white stripes that were too close to West Germany's all white uniform. Luckily IFK Malmo had a yellow uniform in the stadium for the Argentinians to use.
The last instance was a little different, the 1978 World Cup was being held in Argentina and the issue was television. France's blue jerseys and Hungary's red jerseys were very different colors but at the time most people still had black and white televisions and dark colors were hard to distinguish. France had actually been ordered to use their white away jersey beforehand, but somehow Hungary was also mistakenly told to do so and their away jersey was also white. The match was delayed 40 minutes but local neighborhood club Kimberley lent the French their green and white striped kits and solved the problem.
These were the times that a national team literally wore a club jersey in an official World Cup match, but there have been a few others that were inspired by clubs. In the Italy 1990 World Cup, Costa Rica wore a striped black and white jersey for two reasons. Firstly they wanted to pay homage to the countries oldest club SC Libertad who had just closed doors. Secondly they wanted to appeal to the Juventus fans, Italy's biggest fan base who's stadium would host Costa Rica's last group stage match. Similarly Germany in 2014 played in a red and black striped jersey to appeal to Flamengo, Brazil's biggest fan base.
