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In the last few weeks we've seen how Leeds United's iconography matters in ways that go beyond decorative. What the kits look like, what parts of our history should be celebrated and what our club means are more important than aesthetics, but lean heavily upon them.

Three events in particular have highlighted this: the centenary celebrations, Jordan Stevens' six-week ban for betting on football, and the Leeds United Supporters' Trust's new pop-up museum in the Merrion Centre.

The last one is a triumph. It's a tenner: if you can, book a place, pay it and go. On walls, in cases, on screens and along racks are heaps of memorabilia sparking an impossible number of memories. And, everywhere, shirts.

Shirts, shirts, shirts. The exhibition benefits greatly from the kindness of two shirt collectors, Ben Hunt and Dave Moorhouse, and whether behind glass or on a clothes rail the shirts they've loaned evoke nostalgia, fascination and longing. There's a tattered survivor from the 1950s, an airtex shirt from the 1972 FA Cup final, the well-known and lesser-known Umbro Burton shirts, the Top Man kits, a Yorkshire Evening Post title shirt as worn by Gary Speed, the rare all-gold Thistle Hotels kit by Asics, and fine examples from the Packard Bell and Strongbow years. You can also see Paul Rachubka and Felix Wiedwald's gloves, but we'll gloss over that.

More important is the language we slip into to describe those shirts to each other, and what it says about the way sport is intertwined with business and image. As readily as we might refer to the Revie era, the Wilko years or the Champions League season, we use kits as guideposts through our history, and use sponsors' logos to tell them apart.

The extent to which we're locked into these references can be seen by the unexpected success of two shirts in our centenary season. We Are Leeds have produced two alternate-reality shirts, one yellow and blue sourced from Kappa, one all black from Nike. Neither is a design Leeds have ever worn, but by adding a Leeds United white-rose badge and a Yorkshire Evening Post logo, We Are Leeds have added a United lustre that, judging by the number of them on show at Elland Road, a lot of people have found irresistible.

We Are Leeds are superb at reading the zeitgeist, and these are very in. Last season I saw limited numbers of a blue and white version of the kit Adidas produced for the Netherlands in 1988, with an owl added, that were fetching huge sums from Sheffield Wednesday fans, despite their team wearing Umbro during those years. It's a what-if sales pitch that plugs into a nostalgia for something that never happened: a 1980s Adidas Sheffield Wednesday shirt is a sort of retro wish-fulfilment.

We Are Leeds took the idea further. What makes their shirts stand out is not just the retro choice of badge, but the decision to include the sponsor from 1992. That confuses the nostalgia even further: it's as if Leeds won the league wearing a kit that couldn't have been designed in the same century. But without the Yorkshire Evening Post logo front and centre, I don't think the shirts would work. If anything there's more of the YEP about them than LUFC, but that's what makes them uncanny possibilities from a real past, what links them to a precise moment in Leeds United's history that they're meant to evoke. I was reminded of them in the LUST exhibition, where there is a newspaper photo of Lee Chapman and Gary McAllister celebrating the league title in blue sweatshirts with the YEP logo on the chest in yellow and white. You have to look twice before noticing there's no Leeds United badge on there: those colours and that sponsor are enough to say, this is Leeds.

In that context, one of the complaints about the centenary kit Leeds wore against Birmingham City — that it included the logo of sponsors 32Red, in white against white — feels weird. The implication was that it contributed to an overall feeling that the kit, available to fans only in limited quantities, in one size, for a high price, was too sold out; that it wasn't unique, or respectful enough of our identity, to properly celebrate 100 years of Leeds United. But given how often you'll hear fans talk about the 'Lazio blue Packard Bell kit' as one of the club's best, it's hard to understand where the line is, or how the centenary kit crossed it.

The way kits, sponsors and designs are jumbled up with our club's identity is difficult to unpick. There are concerns building that the rumours about Adidas taking over our kit supply will lead to identikit off-the-shelf designs, because only their most prestigious clients get bespoke designs. Leicester City, for example, are playing away in a pink version of Germany's World Cup kit.

But that sort of thing has never stalled the love for some of Leeds United's iconic shirts. The yellow Umbro away kit from 1988-92, that won promotion with Top Man on the front and the First Division with the YEP, was another we shared with Lazio. The home kit from 1988-90 was worn in different colours by Ipswich and Nottingham Forest, but as 'the Top Man shirt', is intrinsic to our history. Before that, the famous Burton home and away kits of 1986/87 were templates shared with several clubs in Scotland; right now on eBay you can find our away version, in gold and blue, described as 'Leeds United style' with no badge and 'National Plastics' emblazoned across the front by the non-league team that must have shared the design.

In 1992/93 Admiral forced Middlesbrough into a white and black version of our 'vomit' away kit; while it was unsettling, at the end of the Champions League season, to be knocked out by Valencia, whose home shirt was a white version of our yellow away kit by Nike.

Regardless of templates or rivals, we generate our own myths to make these designs ours, and then use the sponsors to talk about them, because that's what makes the difference: the colours are obvious, the badge is a given, so what's left is Burton over National Plastics, Top Man over Fisons, Strongbow over a theme park in Spain.

Perhaps this is what 32Red are making difficult, by sponsoring so many teams that we can't distinguish ourselves by talking about our '32Red kit' — Derby and Preston have their own versions of those, in the same colours, Swansea had them, and that's before you get to Middlesbrough, Rangers, Aston Villa. We never had that with Thistle Hotels.

There's also the issue of what 32Red represent, highlighted this week by the Leeds United squad lining up for a photograph in their Unibet branded training gear at the end of a seminar on the dangers of gambling. A slide projected on the wall behind them asked, 'Having attended today's session, are you likely to gamble?' Presumably the right answer was 'no'. But for those of us who haven't attended the session and can only look at the information on their shirts, the answer wanted is yes, yes, yes.

Perhaps there would have been less angst had our centenary shirt advertised cheap suits, cheap newspapers, cheap PCs or cheap cider, rather than an expensive habit that cost Jordan Stevens six weeks of his career, until he was allowed to return to football, and to advertising his own downfall. Football sponsorships reflect the economic shift from making things to providing abstract services that many people find unsettling: what even is a '32Red', anyway? At least you knew where you were with two litres of Strongbow.