Reading Football Club is currently one of the top football clubs in the country, playing in the English Premier League. Their history starts in the year 1871, when they were nicknamed the Biscuitmen and then later the Royals. Reading Football Club went professional in 1895, a year after they had become a founding team of the Southern League.

The first club kit that Reading Football Club wore was a hoop striped jersey in the colors of navy blue and white. The blue and white hoop striped shirt is the most recognizable feature of Reading Football Club's appearance over time, and this was the design of the club kit from 1872 until the 1891 season. In 1891 Reading switched to a uniform with a vertically striped shirt in navy and white, along with solid navy blue shorts and socks. This would remain the style of the Reading club kit until 1938, with the most significant alterations to the vertical striped uniform during those early decades of the twentieth century being occasional changes in the number of stripes, differences in the collar design of the shirt, and the addition of white stripes on the uniform's navy blue socks. In 1938 Reading Football Club kit returned to the traditional hoop striped shirt; now, however, the kit used two shades of blue - navy blue for the shorts and a lighter shade of royal blue for the stripes on the shirt and for the colour of the socks. The hoop stripes stayed for over a decade until 1953 and the shorts stayed the same, although there continued to be regular changes to the sock design.

From 1953 until 1955 Reading Football Club used a white shirt for two seasons, returning to the hoop stripes shirt again in 1955 (but this time with white shorts), and staying that way for another decade. Between 1965 and 1969 Reading Football Club used a significantly different looking uniform which was solid sky blue for both the jersey and the shorts. The socks for this distinctive uniform were white. Afterwards, between the 1969 and 1983 seasons, Reading Football Club went back yet again to royal blue hoop stripes on white for the jersey, and white shorts and socks with royal blue trim, a particularly clean looking uniform. The eighties saw another period of variations, with patterns of sky blue / white for the jersey being combined with navy blue shorts, and socks varying between navy blue and sky blue with varying stripe patterns. In the 1985-1986 and 1986-1987 seasons Reading Football Club had a penguin stripe style design for the jersey, with a single wide white stripe running down the front over a sky blue background.

In the nineties, Reading Football Club went back to the classic design Regular changes have been made to the number of stripes on the club kit jersey, and the design elements on the shorts, as well as the color of the sleeves on the shirt have also been changed frequently from season to season. Some of the sponsors that have been displayed on the jersey for Reading Football Club since the early eighties have been Chronicle, Courage, Auto Trader, Westcoast and Kyocera. In 2006, Reading Football Club reached their greatest level of success in history by qualifying to play in the Premier League for the first time in the club's history.