Port Adelaide’s heritage uniform became the center of an unusually bitter identity dispute in the AFL. Before entering the national competition in 1997, Port Adelaide had represented the club’s long SANFL history in a black-and-white “Prison Bar” guernsey, a design the club had worn in various forms since its nineteenth-century origins and during four SANFL premierships in the 1980s. The problem was that the design closely resembled Collingwood’s famous black-and-white stripes, a visual identity Collingwood had carried in the VFL/AFL since 1897. When Port Adelaide joined the AFL, it was required to abandon its traditional Magpies identity and Prison Bar colors for the teal-and-silver “Power” branding, a compromise intended to prevent a direct clash with Collingwood.
The dispute exploded during the AFL’s Heritage Round program. Port Adelaide was blocked from wearing its 1980s SANFL guernsey during the 2006 round, even though that uniform represented one of the most successful periods in the club’s pre-AFL history. In 2007, after another application for the black-and-white Prison Bar design was initially rejected, Port Adelaide reached an agreement with Collingwood and the AFL allowing it to wear the guernsey under specific conditions. The settlement proved fragile: the AFL subsequently stopped officially sanctioning Heritage Rounds, effectively limiting the occasions on which Port could use the design. In 2021, former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire said he already knew when the agreement was signed that Heritage Rounds were likely to disappear. The episode left a lasting feud over who owned the visual meaning of black-and-white stripes and how much of Port Adelaide’s SANFL identity it was permitted to reclaim in the national league.
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