The house had a visitor this week who got us talking about European football culture in Asia. What followed was this.

A young creative from Hong Kong stopped by earlier in the week and the conversation found its way, as it tends to in here, from design culture to football culture and back again. Somewhere in the middle of it, Bayern Munich's Audi Summer Tour came up. The namesets they wore for their pre-season matches across Asia earlier this summer. And the room hasn't quite moved on since.

For their friendly against Aston Villa in Hong Kong, Bayern commissioned local artist Kristopher Ho to design a special-edition nameset for their 26/27 home kit. The result is a gold-accented font with dragon motifs drawn from ancient Chinese aesthetics, worked directly into the numbers on the back of the shirt. The player names and the FC Bayern header retain the standard white colourway, which is the right call. The dragon detail in the numbers is the story. It doesn't need anything competing with it.

The project was developed in collaboration with Adidas and Hypebeast, and there was a second nameset made for the Jeju Island fixture against Jeju SK, this one created by South Korean artist Dohee Kwon and inspired by Gime, a traditional paper craft unique to the island that is tied to local ritual and ceremony. Two matches, two cultures, two local artists commissioned to interpret them through the visual language of a football kit.

What Bayern Munich did here is worth studying beyond the specifics of the design. 

A pre-season tour is usually a commercial exercise. Clubs go, play matches, take photographs in front of landmarks and fly home. What Bayern chose to do instead was treat each fixture as a cultural moment worth responding to properly, commissioning artists from each host city and limiting the namesets exclusively to local pop-up stores and partner locations. The Hong Kong font is not available globally.

The house visitor who brought this up smiled when we pulled it up on the wall. Said it was the first time she'd seen a European club do something with Asian design culture that felt like it came from a place of actual respect rather than market strategy.

We kept the espresso going for another round after that one.

Shot of the good stuff.