Decode your Manchester casuals tribe.

Six questions on trainers, jackets, shops and music, scored against six real strands of Manchester casual style, from the original 1980s terrace look through to today's Stone Island generation. Answer them and it tells you which tribe you actually fit, the brands that define it, and where to actually buy into it in Manchester.

Where the casuals actually came from

Casual culture started on football terraces in the late 1970s, not in a shop or a magazine. Fans following English clubs to European away games came back with expensive continental sportswear that nobody at home was wearing yet, Adidas, Fila, Sergio Tacchini, Ellesse, and started wearing it to matches instead of the club colours and scarves that had marked football fans out for a generation before. Wearing designer sportswear rather than team kit had a practical side too: it let you move through a city and a crowd without being immediately read as a football fan by police or by rival fans, at a time when that was a genuinely useful thing to be able to do. Within a few years it had become a competition in its own right, who had the newest, rarest, most expensive piece, running in parallel to whatever was happening on the pitch.

The early wardrobe is still the reference point every later era gets measured against: Adidas SL76 and Trimm Trab trainers, Pringle knitwear, Sergio Tacchini and Fila tracktops, Lacoste and Burberry worn as a quiet, expensive signal rather than a loud one. Manchester's version of the scene, split as it always has been between the city's two big clubs, was one of the country's most active, and it's genuinely well documented: Phil Thornton's book "Casuals" is the reference most people who take the subject seriously end up reading, and it's worth seeking out if the quiz result has you wanting the fuller story rather than the six-question version.

Manchester's second, and arguably more famous, contribution to the story arrived at the end of the 1980s, when the casual wardrobe collided with the Hacienda and the acid house scene and came out baggier, looser and considerably more colourful. Adidas Samba and Gazelle replaced the sharper original trainers as the terrace-to-dancefloor uniform, bucket hats and oversized tees came in, and the whole silhouette relaxed without abandoning the original brands. This is the Madchester era properly understood: not a separate youth culture from the casuals that came before it, but the same scene absorbing a new sound and a new drug and dressing accordingly. Joe Bloggs, the baggy-jeans label that became a genuine symbol of the period, is a Manchester name through and through.

The look never disappeared after that, it kept moving. The 2000s pulled in a Y2K sportswear wave, Diesel, Evisu, Asics running silhouettes, alongside the older Adidas archive pieces getting rediscovered by a younger generation who hadn't lived through the first time round. And from the 2010s on, Stone Island and CP Company became the dominant modern uniform, expensive, current-season, instantly recognisable, worn by a generation who know the original terrace history mostly through older relatives and through exactly the kind of brand archive the earlier decades built. Older strands never fully retired either: a mod-adjacent lineage running through Fred Perry and Pretty Green, and a quieter, more considered "grown-up casual" look built around labels like Universal Works and Folk, both still visibly present in the city today alongside the newer Stone Island generation.

What makes this specifically worth understanding as Manchester history rather than generic football or fashion history is that it never became a museum piece here. The terrace tradition is still visible on match days now, not as a costume or a revival but as a continuous line running from the original terraces to whatever a teenager is wearing to the ground this season. That continuity, six distinct eras that all still have people actively wearing them at once rather than one era replacing the last, is what the six results in this quiz are actually trying to capture.

The six tribes

The quiz sorts every answer into six tribes rather than handing back a single flat verdict, and shows a top result alongside two runners-up, since most people's actual wardrobe sits across more than one strand rather than fitting neatly into just one. The 80s Terrace Purist and the Madchester Baggy cover the two original eras described above, the sharp original terrace look and the looser Hacienda-era version that followed it. The Stone Island Head is the modern, current-season continuation of the same lineage, built around Stone Island and CP Company rather than the earlier archive brands. The Y2K Revivalist comes at casuals from a different angle entirely, through Diesel, Evisu and rediscovered vintage Adidas rather than the original terraces. The Dadcore Comeback is the quieter, more considered end of the wardrobe, for anyone who has outgrown the loudest pieces without leaving the tradition behind, built around labels like Universal Works and New Balance rather than anything showy. And the Mod-Casuals Crossover sits where Fred Perry, Ben Sherman and the older mod tradition overlap with terrace style, rather than running alongside it as a separate scene.

This is a styling shortcut and a bit of fun, not a strict taxonomy. Every real casuals scene has always blurred the lines between these tribes far more than six questions can. Wear what you like, know the history, and support the shops that are actually part of it.