Easy to say it now, of course, but the destination of the 2014-15 Scottish Championship title should have been obvious from the get-go. Heart of Midlothian travelled to Rangers back in August for the first match of the season, and there it was, for all to see, in plain sight. Not that it was anything to do with the quality of football on show, exactly, though Hearts did outplay their hosts that day, sashaying around Ibrox with a dip in their collective hip and a glide in their stride.

They deservedly won 2-1, but here’s the rub: the Jam Tarts looked the part. The team were draped in the most beautiful kit worn by any club in many a year: plain maroon, unobtrusive badge, no sponsor, polo collar, a flattering straight hang. A gentle nod to the late 70s and early 80s, it’s a case study in bringing popular retro styles subtly up to date, a brazen switcheroo from Umbro diamond to Adidas stripe the only glaring concession to modernity.

Rangers, by contrast, appeared uncomfortable in their own skin. Literally: those Puma strips are just too damn clingy, look at Kris and Kenny, the silly sausages. But metaphorically too: the shirts are brash, over-designed, with manufacturer’s logo, sponsor and crest all the wrong proportion, bunched up way too high on the shirt, aping the result of a printer misfeed.

Not much had changed when the teams met at the end of the season at Tynecastle. Maroon even has something of a slimming effect, up to a point, and on trotted the marvellously snuggly Género Zeefuik to score a dramatic late equaliser that, taking the basic physics of load transfer into consideration, was even more fleet-footed than Lionel Messi’s second against Bayern Munich. You look good, you feel good, you can do anything.

The Jam Tarts looked the part this season, while Rangers, by contrast, appeared uncomfortable in their own skin. Photograph: Jeff Holmes/PA

The correlation between well-designed kit and well-functioning team seems obvious. Rangers were always up against it in that shirt this season; in that respect, the money woes, boardroom brouhahas and mere presence of Ally McCoist were all red herrings. They should by rights always have one of the most beautiful shirts in the country – that RFC monogram is a stone-cold design classic – and they’ve managed to pull it off properly plenty of times before. Willie Waddell, Jim Baxter and Davie Cooper were never sent out looking like a half-squeezed tubes of Ultra Brite, and see how they played.

Many great football men have realised the importance of getting the kit right. Bill Shankly got rid of Liverpool’s white shorts because man-mountain Ron Yeats looked even more intimidating dressed tip to toe in red. Don Revie demanded Leeds United wore all white to fool the opposition into thinking they were facing the second coming of Real Madrid. Brian Clough signalled a changing of the guard at Derby County, and in English football, by replacing the fusty old crest desecrating the shirt with a symbolic out-of-my-way-I’m-coming-through ram’s head.

Glenn Hysen has taken most of the blame, but it’s surely no coincidence that Liverpool’s aura as the best team in the land began to fade when the team trotted out in those paintbrush-and-turps Candy rags. Or that it collapsed totally when Adidas started idiotically pricking about with outrageously intrusive white stripes across the shoulder, then around the torso, though to be fair someone at the sportswear giants might have been employing subtle slenderising techniques to do Neil Ruddock and Julian Dicks a favour there. Liverpool had fairly plain designs in 2000-01, 2004-05 and 2013-14, just saying.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Don Revie, filming Leeds captain Bobby Collins in 1965. Photograph: A. Jones/Getty Images

Do Newcastle United’s current woes have anything to do with the unpleasant black chevron at the top of their shirts, breaking up the famous black-and-white stripes? It seems ridiculous to suggest it. But then look what happened when Umbro foisted a half-thin-half-thick-striped affair on them in the early 1990s, a bizarre effort that actually did look like a barcode: they escaped relegation to the third tier for the first time in their history by the skin of their teeth. QED! John Carver likes to fall back on a good excuse as much as the next man, so perhaps he should look into the possibility of his being grifted by Puma.

The devil is in the detail. Manchester United’s mid-Noughties title drought coincided with the introduction to the famous red shirt of an asymmetrical Elizabethan ruff. Scotland have only become fun to watch again since reverting to the old rampant-lion-in-roundel badge of the 1970s. Juventus, Milan and Internazionale have all won many more titles in glamorous thin stripes, a look which instantly evokes the hopelessly romantic, cosmopolitan, unattainable-to-us-Brits sweet life of 50s and 60s Italy, rather than the latter-day thick-striped affairs reminiscent of bank-holiday clearance sales at Sports Direct.

Even the identity of the manufacturer requires careful consideration. Brazil’s epochal kit change came in the wake of the 1950 Maracanazo, their white shirts famously ditched for a tropicalicious mix of yellow, green and cobalt blue. But little is said of the decision to ditch regional kit provider Topper in the early 1990s in favour of multi-national concern Umbro, then latterly Nike.

True, Brazil went on to win two of the next three World Cups in their culturally homogenised clobber, but success is not just about trophies. There was something special about geniuses like Socrates and Zico swanning around in cheap threads stitched together by a lesser-known firm, an off-the-cuff charm that stretched all the way back to 1958, when change shirts (any colour) had to be quickly sourced from a local shop for the World Cup final against yellow-clad Sweden. Going into the World Cup final with the nearest gear to hand! But a little something has since been lost, Brazil forever diminished. You can be sure the world would not have been laughing at Brazil losing 7-1 at home in their own World Cup if they were still scooting around in Topper tops.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brazil’s Tostão, in all his finery. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Not that this is particularly a paean to humdrum conservatism. Coventry City were past masters in pushing the envelope: the tramlines down the sides of their 1970s Admiral shirt, the Denmark-referencing, split-screen, four-toned Hummel affair, the shamelessly commercial Talbot T. The only downside to the infamous chocolate away strip of the late 70s was the misplaced glee with which many a chancer during the 1990s, inexcusably smug in their misshapen baggy clothes, branded a perfectly serviceable design as The Worst Kit Ever™. Groupthink at its most profoundly depressing.

Magnificent and memorable shirts all. A few mistakes made along the way, sure – think what poor Micky Quinn was forced to pull on – but that’s the price you pay sometimes for living on the cutting edge and daring to be different. Coventry bravely ploughed their own furrow, and against all the odds managed to stay in the top division for 34 years. And look what’s happened since their shirts became tasteful. Coincidence? What they’d give for a Jimmy Hill de nos jours to lead them back out into the world of sartorial excess again.

Admittedly it’s a difficult balancing act. Arsenal’s historical nadir came during the mid-1960s, when for a while they became an anachronistic non-event. That period coincided with a decision to go all-red and get rid of the famous white sleeves. They were soon reinstated and, confidence and identity restored, a league and FA Cup double was won soon after. Now they have not won a league title since bringing a redcurrant curtain down on Highbury in 2006. Did ditching the sleeves again mess with their delicate mojo? Has subsequent pointless detailing on the white sleeves continued to throw them off their equilibrium? Perhaps – and let’s not even begin with the colouring-in-book version of that proud, intricate, gilt-embossed badge.

Or perhaps the explanation is a little more simple, and we’re back to the Hearts-Rangers dynamic again. Chelsea and Manchester City have been trading in crisp, clean, classic designs for some time now, and the trophies keep rolling in. But poor old Arsenal must pour themselves into those Puma tops. No wonder Jack Wilshere’s on the pipe: like Miller and Boyd up north, he surely can’t be feeling on top of his game in that.

So here’s to the designer of your team’s new strip for next season having had a long hard think. If not, they could have sealed your fate before a ball’s been kicked. And there’s some folk saying it’s all about money.