The best new shirts revealed so far ahead of the 2025/26 season - with Man Utd, Arsenal & Chelsea among the offerings.
As we trawl wearily through the long, football-free summer – look, the Club World Cup barely counts and the Women’s Euros haven’t started yet – we do at least get some light relief in the form of a steady slew of releases and leaks of brand new kits for the 2025/26 season.
Some of them, inevitably, have been terrible, and in general we think that the world’s kit manufacturers have been pretty conservative with their efforts based on everything we’ve seen so far. But that doesn't mean that there haven’t been a few humdingers deserving of praise.
Below are six of the best new shirts from the Premier League and beyond which will grace the chests of our favourite players next year. More will be revealed over the coming weeks and months and may well blow some of these out of the water (we’re still waiting for some new Ezeta offerings…) but for now, these are the pinnacle of fashion for the coming campaign.
Manchester United’s 2025/26 third kit
We quite like United’s new white and purple away kit despite a relatively mixed reaction from the fans, but it’s this stylish black number which caught our eyes the most – and made us wonder why we don’t see black kits more often. Maybe it’s the historical connections to referees or something. Nobody really wants to go out dressed like Mike Dean, we suppose.
It’s the yellow and blue trim which does it. Those stripes could easily have been a little too bold, but they’re just the right thickness and brightness to offer a rather elegant contrast to the body of the shirt and the result is a kit which is really rather easy on the eye. It’s just a bit of a pity that all the evidence suggests the football that will be played by everybody wearing this kit won’t be as attractive as the kit itself. They’ll look lovely stumbling on their way to 15th place, at least.
Club America’s new home kit
Another excellent Adidas design, this one was obviously inspired by Mexican outfit Club America’s classic Nineties jersey – shown in all its glory on the right of the social media post above – and while this brand new offering isn’t quite as good as the original, that still leaves plenty of room for it to be a first-rate shirt.
It’s loud in a stylish manner, a high-effort throwback which hits all the right notes and recalls the great and garish goalkeeper outfits of yesteryear, or perhaps the legendary Germany kit of 1994. Referencing multiple iconic Nineties kits at the same time is certainly an efficient way into out hearts. The shirt sponsor’s name, Caliente, translate as ‘hot’, too. Damned right it is. Adidas are knocking it out of the park this summer. Let’s hope that somebody at Castore, in particular, is taking notes.
Chelsea’s 2025/26 away kit
Chelsea have had some pretty poor kits in recent years, if we’re being honest, with their manufacturers often guilty of over-complicating things (and let’s not get started on that horrible ‘molten liquid’ look from last year while contrived to spoil a sponsorless shirt) but this year’s away kit marks a significant improvement.
Granted, it looks a little bit like a forgotten Portugal top, but while it may not immediately scream ‘Chelsea’ it’s actually a throwback to a shirt from the club’s 1974/75 shirt. Admittedly, one is compelled to wonder why they’d be so desperately keen to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the last time that they got relegated, but it must be acknowledged that it’s a very sharp look for next year’s randomly-assembled collection of overpriced left wingers to wear.
Finland’s new home and away kit
The two new Finland shirts to be worn over the course of the next year or so have been out for about a month now, so hopefully plenty of you have already gazed lovingly upon Nike’s best design of the summer so far - but for those of you who might have missed it, it’s more than worth mentioning. Just be sure to have something at hand to mop up any drool afterwards.
Between the perfectly-sized and impeccably-trimmed stripe running down the home jersey, and the cool-as-hell Nordic arthouse owl layered into the glorious away effort, they actually look rather like something the brilliant Italian football fashion house Ezeta would come up with – and that’s a very, very good thing indeed, given that Ezeta’s efforts have largely been limited to Serie D so far. More of this sort of thing, please. Almost as easy on the eye as Jari Litmanen’s left foot.
Arsenal’s 2025/26 home kit
We’ll admit to being suckers for a nice, clean off-white kit, and this subtly textured cream, gold and maroon effort is pretty much precisely calibrated to our senses. Well, our eyes, anyway. We have no comment on what it might taste like. Don’t put football shirts in your mouths, kids, even when they look as tidy as this.
We like Arsenal’s new away shirt, too, with its blue lightning look that essentially makes it an upgraded version of the 2021/22 third shirt, but it’s the understated elegance of this jersey that gets the biggest thumbs up from us - and the alternate ‘cannon’ logo is such an upgrade on the official club badge that we wonder why that doesn’t just go over to it full time. It’s like a great lost Roma kit from Carlo Ancelotti’s playing days, and that’s pretty high praise coming from us. Second place will never look so good again.
Paris Saint-German’s 2025/26 home kit
The French side will go from winning the Champions League to winning Ligue 1’s Best Dressed award, unless one of their peers has something really spectacular up their perfectly-tailored sleeves, and we suppose it’s only appropriate that a side from the world’s foremost fashion capital would be clad in one of the coolest kits of the coming campaign. And if Milan want to have a word about that last sentence, just look at the awful new Inter top. That blew it for the whole city.
The combination of the subtly patterned blue and the bold latticed red and white stripe on both the shirt and socks could easily have come off as overdone and needlessly complicated, but Nike nailed this one, making it lively and original without allowing the concept to take over the entire shirt and make a mess of things. The away top, a plain white effort with a stylised red and blue outline of the Eiffel Tower running diagonally down from the shoulder isn’t too shabby either. Ooh la la indeed.
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