World Cup: US unforms inspired by 1950 upset of England

It's called "The Game of Their Lives." It's also known as the biggest upset in the history of the World Cup.

In 1950, the US shocked the entire soccer world when it upended England 1-0 in the World Cup.

Heading into the 1950 World Cup England considered themselves "Kings of Football" with an impressive post-war record of 23 wins, 4 losses and 3 draws. On the flip side of the coin, the Americans were downright awful, having lost their last seven in a row by a combined score of 45-2. If you're a betting man, the odds were 3-1 for England to bring home the World Cup compared to 500-1 for the Yanks.

Only 1 American reporter covered the game, and he paid his own way to travel to Brazil. And back in England, some newspapers assumed the 1-0 scoreline was a misprint and reported the score as 10-1 or 10-0 in favor of England.

The uniforms the US team will be wearing this summer are inspired by the shirts worn by the US 60 years ago. Of course, the US's first opponent in the 2010 World Cup is England. Vanity Fair has a brief article about the uniforms and the history behind them. The 1950 edition is seen above and the current version is below:

Another interesting fact about the current jerseys is how they were made - completely from recycled plastic. According to the US Soccer web site:

• Most environmentally-friendly jerseys ever are made entirely from recycled polyester
• Each jersey is produced from up to eight recycled plastic bottles
• Nike fabric suppliers sourced discarded plastic bottles from Japanese and Taiwanese landfill sites and then melted them down to produce new yarn that was ultimately converted to fabric for the jerseys
• The yarn-making process saves raw materials and reduces energy consumption by up to 30 percent compared to manufacturing virgin polyester
• In creating jerseys for all of their national teams, Nike prevented nearly 13 million plastic bottles from going into landfill sites.
• If the recycled bottles used to make the jerseys were laid end-to-end, they would cover more than 1864 miles (which is more than the entire coastline of South Africa) .