The worst new kits leaked or revealed ahead of the 2025/26 season so far.
We’re deep in the heart of kit reveal season, in which leaks and official releases of clubs’ new shirts for the 2025/26 campaign begin to roll in and we get a chance to judge teams on what really matters – not the trophies won or their playing style, but by their fashion sense.
We’ve probably seen (officially or unofficially) about 40% of the kits that Premier League teams will don when they return to action in August, and as a general rule we’d say that the kit manufacturers have played it pretty safe so far. There haven’t been many standouts, but equally there are only a handful of real duds set to hit the shelves over the coming months.
But some of those duds… Well, they deserve to be highlighted and pilloried, such that the people responsible for designing them never consider forcing us to look at anything like them ever again. Here are six of the worst from England and around the world – and if you haven’t yet seen it yet, just you wait for Manchester City’s third kit this year. The FA should add a 116th charge for that one alone.
Inter Milan (home)
For decades, Serie A was the unquestioned king of footballing fashion. Almost every Nineties jersey worn across the league proved to be an enduring classic. How the mighty fall. Inter Milan have a rich history of gorgeous shirts and a classical design template, and one would think that it should be virtually impossible for any kit manufacturer to mess things up. So, in a way, we should probably congratulate Nike for achieving something which we thought could never be done.
The bulbous, uneven stripes, with their tie-dye colour fade and laughable attempt to spell the word ‘Inter’ across the front - no, really, there’s meant to be a word in among all that - mark a hideous new low for the look of a club that once had some of the best kits in history. If they’d tried anything like this back in the good old days, Football Italia wouldn’t have been commissioned and Adriano would have retired even earlier.
Everton (home)
Speaking of assignments that should be pretty difficult to make a meal of, designing Everton’s home kit is usually just about as straightforward as it gets. Right shade of blue, bit of white trim, maybe change the collar up, sorted. Unless you’re Castore, of course, in which case you need to try and get just a bit clever and end up looking anything but.
They’ve decided to mess with the template, which might have been fine if they’d put a bit more thought into it. Instead, we get some faint wavy lines running across the top which contrive to make the whole assemble look about five times worse. A decent collar and some sleeve trim might have just about salvaged this, but the overall effect is a kit which seems to have been thrown together by someone who desperately wanted to demonstrate some design flair, but didn’t actually have any. Mercifully, the away shirt is pretty decent.
Bayer Leverkusen (away)
Now, we’re not the kind of football fans who are at all averse to a pink kit. Our collective sense of our own masculinity is not so fragile that we take any umbrage to such shirts, and there have been some very stylish pink tops released over the years. This just isn’t one of them.
It’s not the idea that we take exception to, but the execution. Had the pink been faded into the white properly, or some trim added to the hem or sleeves which pulled it all together, there’s potential for a rather pleasing kit here. As it stands, it looks as though New Balance were running out of time and paid somebody on Fiverr to get it done as quickly as possible to meet a deadline. The red and blue trim on the collar, which jars with everything else that’s going on, is just the icing on the Poundland cake. The home shirt isn’t brilliant, either.
Newcastle United (away)
Look, we’re not going to use this article as a forum to complain about the continued Saudification of Newcastle’s away shirts, simply because you will probably have made up your mind about whether you’re bothered or not some time ago. But we will complain about the fact that the latest green away kit is simply rather rubbish.
Supposedly, the curved lines across the chest are meant to pay homage to the city’s iconic Tyne Bridge which, to be fair, has just been given a fresh lick of green paint – but we struggle to imagine that 1920s architects Mott, Hay and Anderson would see their vision in this kit, which mostly offers a fine testament to the reasons that very few teams think green is a good shirt colour. Perhaps it’s meant to be camouflage, so opposing teams can’t see Alexander Isak against the St. James’ Park turf. That, or it’s just a bad kit.
Stoke City (home and away)
You can imagine the pitch meeting for these, can’t you? For years, some enterprising young designer observed, Stoke City has been a byword for old-fashioned, entertainment-light football, never mind how long it’s been since Jon Walters hung his boots up. We still make ‘rainy Tuesday evening’ jokes even though Pulisball is but a faded memory of the Barclaysman era. So, this smart young thing at Macron probably said, we should jazz things up a little. Bring Stoke into the modern age via a snazzy shirt or two.
The results are a home kit with sharp zig-zag lines that look likely to induce a seizure if stared at for too long, and a franky vile purple away number – admittedly only visible in grainy leaked photos for now – which appears to have been cribbed from a Magic Eye book. It’s the kind of top 11-year-olds wore in the Nineties to upset their mothers when they went out skateboarding. These tops definitely don’t do it in Stoke, on any evening, in any weather.
Manchester City (third)
You know the best thing about those Stoke kits, or indeed any of the shirts we’ve reviled so far? They aren’t this one. This, in our humble but accurate opinion, is the worst kit that will ever grace the Premier League – at least, if the leaks prove to be accurate. For the sake of our eyes, we sincerely hope they aren’t.
We get why someone at Puma might, in the midst of a drug-addled ‘no bad ideas’-style discussion, might have pitched a kit designed to look like rain falling on a window on a grotty grey day. It’s Manchester, after all. But for the concept to have been carried through to the final design stage, with hideous smears of a neon yellow-green thrown in for good measure? We are simply baffled.
No wonder Florian Wirtz didn’t want to sign for City. No wonder there’s talk that Pep Guardiola won’t stay beyond his current contract. They saw this and started running. If The Premier League need to convince a court of any kind that Manchester City should be relegated once those endless proceedings draw to a close, they just need to hold this up in front of the judge and they’ll be down in the Conference North before you can say ‘Nicky Summerbee’. This is as bad as football shirts get.
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