Design a shirt in a strong colour and half your decisions are made for you. Design one in white and every seam, every panel join and every mark from a season is visible. That is why the England shirt has changed less over the decades than almost any other national design — there is very little that can be done to it.

For a buyer it means one thing: inspect the listing photos. Look at the collar, the underarm and the hem. On a white shirt, whatever is wrong will be visible there first.

The three lions on the chest predate modern tournament football by centuries, and the crest has carried them continuously. It is one of the very few national badges that reads correctly at a distance without any colour at all.

That is part of why an England shirt is such a reliable gift. The badge does the identifying. You do not need to know the season or the player for it to land.

Outside a tournament, an England shirt is worn. In a tournament summer it is kept. People buy one, wear it for six weeks, and then it goes into a drawer and comes out again four years later — which is a completely different set of requirements from a shirt that gets worn every week.

If you are buying in a tournament year, buy early and buy the home shirt. The away design is often the more interesting one, but the home is the one that appears in the photographs.

Because the shirt itself is so plain, whatever goes on the back is doing all the personalising. A 9 means one thing to an England supporter and a 7 another, and both of those meanings have changed hands more than once.

If you are unsure, print a surname rather than a number, or leave it blank. A plain white England shirt with nothing on the back is a complete object and always has been.