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The best, worst and weirdest new kits outside the Premier League

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The best, worst and weirdest new kits outside the Premier League


We’ve done the Premier League home kits and taken care of the Premier League away kits, but because absolutely everyone loves kits and everyone has opinions on kits, here are some more kits.

This is a round-up of stuff from around Europe that isn’t the Premier League, taking in the big daddies of the continent, smaller but peachy designs that you may have missed, and some truly weird kits that lead you to wonder about the minds that made them happen.

So read on, give your opinions, and tell us about the ones we’ve missed.

More on the world of football gear…

There’s essentially nothing remarkable about this Real Madrid shirt.

It is white, it’s got a bit of a pattern on the background (which is apparently inspired “by the ‘chulapo’” outfits worn at Madrid’s annual San Isidro Fiesta’, if you care about that sort of thing) and it has a slight black trim that includes the Adidas stripes. You could have designed this in 10 minutes.

But rather than include their more adventurous alternate kits, let’s hear it for simplicity, for a classic, a clearly identifiable design that is incredibly basic but unmistakably belongs to one club. It’s the sort of recognition that a thousand brand consultants could spend a thousand years on and not do as well. They occasionally muck around with gold or purple trim, but this is a Real Madrid kit.

Rating: 9/10

Bayern (third)

Does falling for a super slick corporate advertising launch featuring famous people make you a rube? A shill for Big Shirt? A useful idiot for the biggest sportswear companies out there? If so, put all of that on a big stencil and tattoo it on my forehead. I could only really choose one of the new trefoil range recently released by Adidas, and while the Juventus, Real Madrid and Manchester United shirts are pretty sexy (we can take or leave Arsenal), it has to be Bayern’s cream and red number, as modelled by Bastian Schweinsteiger.

Rating: 9/10

PSG (away)

There’s a long-held perception that PSG are not quite ‘of Paris’ in the same way that a couple of the French capital’s other lower-profile clubs would like to think they are.

Football is typically a working-class sport and PSG are not a working-class club: their stadium is in a smart part of town, they’ve only been around for 50 years, so are still thought of as upstarts by some, they are owned by a state with more money than God. There has been a concerted effort in recent years to tie them to the city and ‘brand Paris’ more, which is how you end up with this kit, whacking you around the head with Parisian symbolism. The PSG badge has depicted the Eiffel Tower for years, but this feels like they’re shouting, ‘LOOK, WE ARE FROM PARIS, RIGHT? FAMOUS CITY, YOU’VE PROBABLY BEEN THERE — PARIS!’ in your face.

Rating: 7/10

It’s Barcelona’s 125th anniversary this year, which means they have gone back to their roots with their new kit to commemorate the occasion… which is basically the same as the kit with which they commemorated their 100th anniversary.

Is this a double nod to the past, to the club’s founding and also tapping into the rich vein of 1990s/2000s nostalgia? Or is it just a spot of laziness, a team/kit designer who couldn’t be bothered thinking of something new, so they just went with something old? Does it matter as long as the kit is nice? That last question is where this kit falls down, because it just looks like an extremely bad knock-off version of a Barcelona shirt that you’d find in a bargain supermarket somewhere, only you’ll have to pay £99 ($130) for this one. £99!

Rating: 5/10

Roma (home)

Is it important whether a kit ‘feels’ like it belongs to the club? Or is whether it looks good the only thing that matters? If your answer is yes to the first question, then this Roma kit is a dud, Adidas having no place providing the shirts for the club of Kappa, of Diadora, of (at a push) Nike, with the ‘it just doesn’t feel right’ needle going absolutely haywire. But if your answer is yes to the second question, then this is a peach, a delight, a wonderful deployment of two different types of stripe — pin and Adidas — that at the same time doesn’t look too ‘busy’, the ever-beautiful Roma colour combination of deep red and gold making this look a dream.

Rating: 8/10

Inter (home)

This is the Harvey Two-Face of football shirts: maybe not the really nasty, Aaron Eckhart one from The Dark Knight, more the Tommy Lee Jones, campy one from Batman Forever (a much-maligned film, by the way). Two shirt designs stitched together to form one, a pair of competing ideas that, for some reason, have been used on one shirt instead of two different ones. You feel like asking the classic, slightly passive-aggressive pre-match interview question for a coach who’s made a strange selection choice: “What’s the thinking there?”

Rating: 4/10

Sporting Lisbon (home)

Can a football shirt be ‘controversial’? With everything that is happening in the real world, it feels trite at best to claim something like that, unless the shirt is sponsored by, say, a betting firm that may or may not exist, or a murderous state linked to the deaths of thousands. So this Sporting shirt isn’t ‘controversial’ in that respect… but it’s quite a departure from the iconic green and white hoops that the Lisbon club have sported since, as far as I can work out, the 1920s. They’ve added an extra hoop, you see: a black hoop. Scandal! Is this a brave twist on a classic, or sacrilege, the desecration of a holy item? Or just a shirt and we should just calm down a bit?

Rating: 5/10

Juventus (home)

This just looks like a fairly standard Juventus kit, so there’s nothing much to write about from an aesthetic standpoint, but I’ve included it because of the ‘inspiration’ behind the design. The bobbly background design (which really just makes the wearer look like they are sweating, even if they are standing still) is supposed to be “subtle crater patterns reflecting the moon’s surface”, and the whole thing is “inspired by lunar missions”. What connection does Juventus, a football club from northern Italy, have with lunar missions? None at all! “Highlighting the club’s continual pursuit of progression, the design inspires players and fans alike to explore new horizons,” it says on the Juve website. Superb. It’s the High Performance Podcast, in shirt form.

Rating: 6/10

Red Bull launched its rapacious footballing empire by taking over Austria Salzburg. The club’s new owner simply could not countenance the idea of its new, renamed team continuing to play in purple. “The red bull can’t be violet, or else we couldn’t call it Red Bull,” said Red Bull head honcho Dietrich Mateschitz at the time. And yet, here is proof that the bull doesn’t have to be red. There was some consternation among the Leeds support that the presence of their new sponsors meant an undesirable amount of red (which is to say: any red) on their home shirt but on the away top, the bull is blue and the rest of the design is glorious. Simple, but glorious, right down to the 1970s retro badge.

Rating: 8/10

According to Hull, this season’s away kit is “a modern twist on the away kit from our first competitive season back in 1905-06”. Now, the only pictures I can find of that shirt from 120 years ago suggest it is… just a white shirt. So that spiel might well be nonsense and it seems to have more in common with their away shirts from the late 1980s and early ’90s… but let’s not get ourselves bogged down in the accuracy or otherwise of some promotional bumf.

This is a delight, a lovely combination of the signature black and orange Hull colours on an otherwise white shirt, and a welcome return for the too-infrequently seen Kappa in our consciousness.

Rating: 8/10

The Hull kit might not be a conscious nod to the shirts of the early 1990s, but this absolutely is, and it’s an absolute clinic in how to do retro. This is a tribute to the away shirt worn in the early 1990s — in fact, it’s basically a direct copy of it, which you could call lazy but the added connection is that this is the first time since then that Hummel has designed their kits. Does that really matter? Do most people care about that stuff? Maybe not, but people who write about football kits do, and we can all agree that’s the most important thing here.

Rating: 9/10

It’s always enjoyable when a club goes for a design that is a fairly literal interpretation of a local landmark. At the luxury end, you have PSG splashing the Eiffel Tower all over their shirt. Here, you have Blackpool releasing an away kit that apparently draws “visual graphic inspiration from the Pleasure Beach rides and shapes”. If any of our American readers are unfamiliar with Blackpool Pleasure Beach, think of it as a scaled-down version of Coney Island, without Joey Chestnut chomping away at Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Then think of that on a football shirt. I am, without irony, a fan.

Rating: 7/10

Some shirt designers like to go route one with any animal-related symbolism they are given to play with: if the team’s emblem is a lion, then you stick a massive roaring lion on the shirt, job done, there you go, it’s a lion. But there seems to be a bit of a trend now for a sort of deconstructed picture: the lion, but is it a lion? Yes, it is a lion, but only if you look quite carefully, and piece the thing together. Symbolism, you see, but you have to work for it. All of which is a little bit strange and, in the case of this Rangers away shirt, does make for a very busy design, but also still one that works.

Rating: 7/10

Alcorcon (home)

We’re into the ‘niche European teams with really nice kits’ section of the ratings here, and take a look at this beauty from Spanish third-tier outfit Alcorcon. It’s the old reverse Boca Juniors design, with the yellow main body with the blue band across the chest, but there are plenty of other little touches that make this really great too: the old-fashioned collar, the subtle pinstripes, the careful placing of the Kappa logo, the fact it’s a Kappa shirt. A beaut, a wonder, a glorious football kit.

Rating: 10/10

Goztepe (home)

This shirt has mainly been included for the checkerboard design, a bold but excellent choice and one that isn’t used enough, possibly because teams are just intimidated by the daddies of the genre, Croatia. The red and yellow combo with that checkerboard really works too. But it’s also here because of the incredibly weird launch video the club put out, which shows a group of balaclava-wearing men breaking into Gotztepe’s stadium (one of whom is revealed to be the Turkish actor Riza Kocaoglu), which they depict as being part of the club’s ‘rebellious’ identity. Just imagine some regular Joe trying to pull that stunt, holding out their arms and saying, “But it’s part of our rebellious identity, they showed it in the kit release video” as they’re bundled into a police van.

Rating: 8/10 (shirt), 2/10 (misleading announcement video)

I’ve long held the opinion that the multi-club concept is not desirable. It is an approach that subsumes century-old institutions into a vast, featureless organisation, ultimately making everything the same, like when you were a kid and you smushed lots of different colours of Play-Doh together and it just ended up forming a brownish mulch. But then again, if it produces kits like this Girona away top, then I’m perfectly prepared to ditch my principles. What a joy this is, deploying the generally under-deployed but always special sash approach to football shirt design, the yellow and red popping perfectly from the dark blue of the main body. Superb.

Rating: 9/10

Really the point of a feature like this is just to celebrate things that look nice, and not read too much into them or their meanings. Considering the feature is going to top out at about 2,500 words, I have clearly failed. So let’s just appreciate a shirt that simply looks great, as this Real Valladolid away top does. It’s clearly a Marseille shirt, right down to the fact it’s made and designed by Kappa, but we can forgive that and pass it off as a tribute when it looks as good as this.

Rating: 8/10

Basel (home)

Wow. Flames! Flames from the top and the bottom of the shirt! It’s bold, to say the least, but bold doesn’t necessarily mean good… and it most certainly does not in this case. This looks like a joke gone too far, or a marketing person wildly misinterpreting someone they have seen on the internet ironically wearing the sort of heinously ugly shirt that looks like it belongs on a nu-metal bass player from the early 2000s. Or a mid-level darts player. It’s bad, but spectacularly bad… so at least that’s something… possibly.

Rating: 1/10

Latina Calcio (home)

You don’t often hear much about middling clubs from the Italian third division, so it’s perhaps no surprise that they feel they have to do stuff like this to get a bit of attention. Maybe that’s unfair. You would think that this is part kit, part publicity stunt. Why else would you base a football kit on Homer’s Odyssey, introducing a thin excuse to have it modelled by a sexy long-haired warrior type holding a sword? But then again, why not do it just for yucks?

There are plenty of plain, unadventurous kits out there that will get someone like your fearless kit rater going ‘hmmm’ and nodding solemnly, perhaps complimenting a colleague wearing one at a five-a-side game. Why not just do something like this because you can? So hats off Latina Calcio: this is absurd, but sometimes we all need a little more absurdity in our lives.

Rating: 6/10 (shirt), 10/10 (audacity)

Hartberg (home)

Making money when you’re not one of the big teams in one of the big leagues is tough. No doubt about that. You have to squeeze every cent you can from whatever source you can. If that means you lose a little dignity along the way, then so be it. But the Austrian Bundesliga’s Hartberg have taken things a step further (as they have done in previous years), with this shopping list sponsors, which makes their shirt look like one of those lampposts with loads of stickers for bands, football teams and whatever else that have gradually accumulated over years. We hope you admire our restraint in getting to the last sentence of this section before we mention #1 Spermbooster — sometimes you just have to take the high ground.

Rating: 3/10 (shirt), 10/10 (boosting sperm)

(Top photos: Getty Images)



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