We’re still waiting on some stragglers and official releases, so do check back for further updates, but here are our objectively correct rankings of the Premier League’s 25/26 home kits for you to enjoy and not get unnecessarily cross about.
Remember, these are the correct opinions.
Big themes for this season include: round collars, local ‘inspiration’ and more immediately obvious divergence between ‘replica’ and ‘authentic’ versions of shirts. We’re not really happy about any of those themes, if we’re honest.
Away and third kits to follow in due course but there are still just far too many unknowns and uncertainties there for any kind of solid ranking, and as you know we wouldn’t want to just put our name to any ranking that was half-baked. Ahem. On we go.
TBC: Crystal Palace
We don’t even have a clear idea who’s making the as-yet-unreleased kit for the FA Cup winners. They’ve been with Macron in recent years, but we have been unable to track down details of the length of that contract. Another TBC in terms of both the kit itself and more importantly its ranking, then.
TBC: Bournemouth
Cannot even be ranked in the absence of even vaguely reliable leaks. There appears to even be some doubt about the manufacturer, with some ferociously ugly mock-ups featuring supposed adidas efforts despite our understanding being that Bournemouth still have a year left on their deal with Umbro.
TBC. Sunderland
We’ve seen a few leaks and they’re mainly terrible, but no confirmation yet for what is actually the kit. It’s hummel, so it should be good. Which is the main reason we’re remaining too sceptical to rank based on current leaks.
17) Burnley
Utter woke nonsense, we’re afraid to report. Burnley and Castore were so busy coming up with a shirt that meets the apparent current requirements to ‘taking inspiration from the local area’ that they completely forgot to take inspiration from an actual Burnley shirt.
Update your phone wallpaper to celebrate our 2025/26 Home kit 🥳 pic.twitter.com/g6w7rcNGOE
— Burnley FC (@BurnleyOfficial) July 4, 2025
The marketing bullsh*t manifests in a vaguely topographical pattern designed to represent the fact that East Lancashire, famously and uniquely, has some hills in it.
But they’ve completely failed to put anywhere close to enough blue on here. Yes, Burnley have in the past dispensed with their traditional blue sleeves, but we don’t care for it and it will never look right.
And even when blue sleeves have been missing, there has usually at least been something blue to compensate. In 2017/18 there was a very wide blue cuff to the sleeves, for instance. In 2006/07 there was blue on one sleeve and down one side of the shirt. In 2005/06 there was a blue central band to balance out the claret sleeves.
This is overwhelmingly claret, and that doesn’t sit right with us at all. Even something we normally welcome damns Burnley here: sponsors 96.com have allowed the 9 to change from yellow to blue, and it looks far better for it. But it now becomes the standout blue feature of the shirt.
16) Newcastle United
Annoying. Very, very annoying. Everything about this shirt is first class, apart from the single most important thing which single-handedly ruins it. The laser-blue accents and trim are absolutely lovely and exactly the right tertiary colour for a Newcastle home shirt. The stripes continuing right into the collar is bold but works but also brings us to the problem.
Adidas have – unbelievably and unforgivably – f*cked up this most un-f*ck-up-able of football shirt elements. Newcastle’s black-and-white stripes are a strong contender for being the easiest of all football shirt details to get right. All you have to do is just make sure they’re not too thin, not too thick, all the same width, and with proper clean edges. Iconic. Done. Beautiful.
It is our sorry duty to report they’ve f*cked around with the edges of the stripes. There’s a load of noise about this being ‘dynamic’ and other meaningless shite but it just makes them look hazy and removes all the crispness of a shirt otherwise dripping in it. Fools.
One other damaging detail to note here is that while the trend for selling ‘replica’ tops at a ridiculously high price and then also ‘authentic’ ones for an even higher one is something none of us can now stop, we can’t ever recall the differences between the very expensive replica and the remortgage-your-house authentic being quite so obviously first-glance visible as they are here, with the ‘replica’ version appearing to feature a plain black front half of the collar rather than the stripe continuation of the ‘authentic’.
Feels like a massive swizz for an 85 quid t-shirt not to have something as basic yet central to a shirt as the right collar and dare we say it a deliberate attempt to nudge people towards the £120 version. We hope it doesn’t catch on, but fully expect it will.
Our city. Our team. Our kit.
The Newcastle United 25/26 home kit – available May 29th in-store and online 🖤@adidasfootball pic.twitter.com/SQsyhYkvHy
— Newcastle United (@NUFC) May 23, 2025
15) Manchester City
This is a kit that challenges what had previously been one of our most rigidly and certainly-held kit-based beliefs. And that belief was that sash = good.
And now we don’t know at all. We’re not saying this is bad, we’re saying we’re not sure whether it’s bad or brilliant, and it’s that total lack of conviction that has rattled us into the shadow realm. If we can no longer be sure about sashes on football kits, than what certainties do we have left to cling to?
Man City kit
New Man City kit
We don’t think we’re being dramatic when we say this feels like it might be a harbinger of absolute doom for all mankind. Especially in a year that has already featured Spurs winning a trophy and the MCC allowing members not to wear jackets in the Lord’s pavilion just because it was a bit warm.
We expect confirmation that the ravens are leaving the Tower any moment.
And it’s not even like City have plucked a sash from nowhere either. Sure, it’s never been on the home kit before, but they have a proud away-kit sash history that dates well back into the before times of the 1970s and whatnot.
As for an actual final call on whether this kit is brilliant or bad, we shall strive to arrive at a definitive decision within 28 business days.
14) Brentford
A new home shirt is an event in itself after they took the now wildly unusual step of keeping the old one for two years. It’s certainly an interesting one to mark the switch from Umbro to Joma, and while we really want to like it, it’s not quite right.
Let’s start with the good. The red and white cuffs and collar are good, as are the pinstripes at the edge of the main stripes. Well done there.
Our 2025/26 home kit has arrived 😍 pic.twitter.com/6EPBGoqwq3
— Brentford FC (@BrentfordFC) July 4, 2025
We’re not sold on the white sleeves, though. In our view it tilts the balance of red and white too far in favour of white, and not even the primarily red back for the name-sets can quite save that.
Our big problem, though, is the ‘lace-up’ collar detail. Officially, it’s ‘inspired by our original 1925 kit lace design’ but… it’s a bit wanky isn’t it? There is absolutely nothing on this earth stopping you from being inspired by a lace-up collar by having…a lace-up collar. There was a whole fad for them in the 1990s.
Just sort of drawing a fake one on sadly reduces a shirt that could have been really good to something approaching a novelty. It’s just a little bit too close to ‘humorous T-shirt with a bow-tie drawn on it’ which is a shame.
13) Tottenham
A significant departure this for Tottenham with plenty of non-white areas here. That’s not unusual in itself; what’s unusual is that just as Spurs managers generally alternate in style and tone, so too their home kits operate on a rota switching between all-white (or nearly all-white) and more colourful.
Our new Head Coach 🙌 pic.twitter.com/lS0xDZJMLn
— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) June 18, 2025
Yet after last year’s Kappa-coded full navy blue sleeves comes this effort. Now there’s less navy on this sleeve for sure, but it still constitutes a navy-heavy season, and with plenty of that silvery-blue-gray thrown in for good measure. That colourway brings to mind the Serhiy Rebrov-era late 90s adidas home shirt and we don’t mind that at all, in theory.
We’re also comfortable enough with the central badge. We’re in general very much team crest-on-the-breast, but it just about works here because it is at least correctly accompanied by a central Nike swoosh (unlike last year’s duly unbalanced away kit) and Spurs have enough history of central-badge deployment to just about make it a legitimate option.
What we can’t get away from – and no, we can’t fully explain this – is that the specific placement of the navy areas means this shirt is giving Bolton to a distracting degree.
12) Liverpool
A return to adidas for Liverpool after many years with Nike and based on the plentiful leaks out there it’s a safety-first start to the rekindled relationship, with a low-risk entirely inoffensive shirt that leans heavily on the 2006/07 classic minus the big ol’ flappy collar.
It is absolutely fine but beyond the general feeling of correctness that comes from Liverpool having adidas kits, this isn’t one that on its own is going to grab anyone by the bollards, something we expect the away and third kits to do rather more based on the leaked pics we’ve seen so far.
Golden PL badges on an Adidas Liverpool home kit next season will slap so hard pic.twitter.com/CSQd2XaB3I
— Braden (Fan) 🐦🔥 (@Braden_LFC) April 29, 2025
11) Fulham
Unofficial for now, but it follows last year’s lead on being a predominantly white effort with far less black than we’ve seen previously. Here it is once again reduced to the adidas stripes, the collar and a bit of piping.
It’s absolutely adequate based on the leaks we’ve seen. While we’re always slightly reluctant to rank on leaks, we’re confident nothing new we could learn about this kit will propel it up or down this list in any significant way.
10) Brighton
Not too sure about the asymmetric collar – something Nike are keen on and seen last year on Spurs’ light blue away kit – but generally speaking it’s a bold and bright Brighton kit that we can all enjoy.
One interesting quirk is that it’s almost entirely inverted from last year’s. That had white sleeves and blue cuffs, while this year it’s blue sleeves and white cuffs. Even the American Express logo has been flipped; it’s now white on a blue background instead of last year’s blue on white. Either way, it remains one of the less visually distracting sponsor logos around – and that’s especially tough to pull off on striped kits.
The most exciting thing about Brighton’s kit, though, is that it takes the prestigious award for this season’s most overexcited and unnecessary made-up colour name. Football kit manufacturers rank second only to paint companies in this field, and we are beyond excited to tell you that the little turquoise flashes on the sides of this kit are not in fact just your common or garden turquoise but are in fact Hyper Turq.
The skipper. 💙🤍 pic.twitter.com/xWzf2J3otG
— Brighton & Hove Albion (@OfficialBHAFC) July 1, 2025
9) Everton
Very hard to rank until we actually get to see it for real. Because this might end up being our favourite kit of the lot, but based purely on the online pictures we’ve seen we’re not quite sure that carrying on the wave motif – an obvious nod to the new stadium and its dockside location – into the sleeves has quite paid off.
What we do know for sure is that it’s a beautifully clean-looking Everton shirt for the start of their new era, and while this is no more than a personal preference, a crossover two-tone v-neck collar is absolutely S-tier football kit design in our view, so this scores perfect marks there.
It’s powerfully reminiscent of classic Umbro-NEC era late-80s Everton. And one thing we’d note about that shirt is that the diamond pattern of the main body in that kit wasn’t continued into the sleeves. Not saying that proves anything, but it does show that there was the option to make that another nod to that classic kit.
pic.twitter.com/JbimZktGYA
— Everton (@Everton) June 27, 2025
8) Arsenal
The key challenge for any home kit – away kits where almost anything goes have no such rules – is getting the right answer to one inevitably woolly and hard-to-define yet absolutely crucial question: Does it feel like a Team X kit? You’d be surprised how often this seemingly straightforward test is failed.
For those of us whose football senses were hardwired in the late 80s and early 90s, Arsenal in an adidas kit means it’s almost impossible for them to get it wrong. And the new Arsenal home kit, with the purity of its red and white, could not be more Arsenal.
Declan Rice celebrates his winning goal against Newcastle
Declan Rice’s strike won the game for Arsenal against Newcastle
It’s also a kit that merits viewing close-up in person, because the club’s classic gothic script A woven through it is a first-rate detail.
Our quibbles are minor, but slightly too numerous for this to land right near the top of the list despite so much to recommend it. One is a very personal thing: we really like the old-school simplicity of the Arsenal cannon logo on last year’s kit, and if anything this is a kit for which it would appear even better suited, so it’s a shame in our irrelevant opinion to see the full shield badge restored.
And having said last year’s shirt contained too much blue and praised the simplicity of this year’s, you’ll have to allow us a slight amount of hypocrisy in wondering whether it isn’t in fact, if anything Clive, almost too plain? Especially on that all-white round collar? A tiny amount of navy could have done wonders here.
But we’re nitpicking. Arsenal’s red and white is suitably iconic that they are always better served erring on the side of simplicity – especially when they’ve got the adidas stripes which just look more correct here than anywhere else in the game. Certainly better this than going too heavy on the tertiary colour or, worse still, gilding the lily with unnecessarily gaudy gold as they have in the recent past.
7) Aston Villa
We’re normally quick to dismiss ‘draws inspiration from…’ stuff in kit launches as so much nauseating PR bumwash – especially with this year’s cohort offering a surely record-breaking quantity of said bumwash – but Villa have done it well here if the widespread leaks are anything to go by, with a little bit of sleeve detail that makes obvious yet understated reference to the Holte End. It works in a similar way to Everton’s little Goodison architecture tribute a couple of years back.
We’d have liked to see that detailing from the cuffs extended to the collar, because we really aren’t at all sold on the chunky plain T-shirt collars that so many kits seem to have next season.
A source has leaked the 2025/26 Aston Villa Home Kit, It should officially release inside the next month if this is the actual design. pic.twitter.com/wtRVNHSwQe
— Official AVFC News (@OffAVFCNews) June 11, 2025
Other than that, it’s fine. The gold piping is handled with care and, by working in tandem with that Holte End pattern avoids taking a trip to gaudy-town and it absolutely manages to pass the ‘Feels like a Villa kit’ which is among the harder to pull off in a league with multiple claret-and-blue merchants, albeit perhaps easier this year with both Burnley and West Ham opting – with contrasting results – to lean into the claret.
6) Chelsea
The metallic badges and swirling design of last year have been replaced by a more classic look for a club that has, in general, been among the most consistent deliverers of decent home kits over the years and decades.
Chelsea at the Club World Cup
Chelsea at the Club World Cup
Chelsea does always feel like a home kit you have to actually try and f*ck up, and last year it did feel a little bit like that’s precisely what Nike were doing. It’s one that rewards a ‘isn’t broken, don’t fix it’ mentality. And that means lots and lots of blue, a tiny bit of white, and an even smaller flash of red.
In other words, this year’s Chelsea kit has nailed that brief. The fact it is once again, for now, also sponsorless because Chelsea are such unlike-the-rest disruptors also works far better in combination with the traditional-look-with-modern-styling nature of this year’s shirt in contrast to last year’s more try-hard effort.
Very, very good indeed.
5) Nottingham Forest
We’re still working from leaks here, so it’s a gamble putting this so high but the pinstripes as well as the shield surrounding the badge and the clear nods to the 92-94 kit mean this has all the hallmarks of an absolute banger.
We reserve the right to alter this ranking if the actual shirt disappoints, but at this stage we’re very excited about this one.
4) West Ham
Umbro have done some fine retro work with West Ham in recent years, and it all comes together here in this shiny and powerfully early 80s effort. Even the BoyleSports logo looks like it’s from 1983.
The new home kit – that’s shirt, shorts and socks – in one shot. pic.twitter.com/PdexDvPJo7
— KUMB.com: West Ham United FC Online (@kumbdotcom) July 3, 2025
The return of the full colour club crest is good after last year’s experiment with keeping it to the club’s primary colours, which we didn’t hate but have to now concede doesn’t look as good as this one does.
The striped collars and cuffs are first-rate, and the flashes of blue under the arms are just enough to avoid this falling into the Burnley trap.
Also, while we generally restrict our rankings here to the tops, given the amount of switching and alternate use that goes on with shorts and socks anyway, it is worth noting that West Ham have this year’s best socks, with the stripes of the collar and cuffs deployed simply but expertly.
3) Wolves
Yes, we like this. That’s a pleasingly modern take on a proper old-fashioned collar, and the whole retro vibe is enhanced by a material that almost looks knitted.
Again, we could be wrong because we’re only at this stage going off pictures rather than real-world information, but it does look like the lads at Sudu have got the colour right this time. Fingers crossed anyway, but it definitely looks more gold than last season’s just too yellow offering.
We generally leave sponsors out of these as far as we can, because let’s face it pretty much all of them spoil a shirt to some degree or other, but DEBET’s logo being all black this year rather than having colour on the ‘toothpaste’ bit of the first E also definitely helps Wolves stick the retro-vibe landing here.
We have very few notes on this high-scoring effort.
Introducing the 2025/26 SUDU Home Kit.
The Golden Thread, Inspired by Molineux Pleasure Grounds.
Available Online: Friday 27th June 9am
In-store: Friday 4th July 10am pic.twitter.com/ZKBaOCBhd0
— Wolves (@Wolves) June 26, 2025
2) Manchester United
Your mileage may vary, but personally we’re fans of predominantly black trim on a Manchester United shirt, and that feels even more important this year with Liverpool also back in the adidas fold. You do need a clear point of difference between those iconic red shirts, and it’s United’s history of black as an accent colour that makes it possible. Its use in the collar, cuffs and piping that hits just the right balance between subtle and striking, is on point here.
Happy birthday, Alejandro! 🎉 pic.twitter.com/Zijn0UkTty
— Manchester United (@ManUtd) July 1, 2025
This shirt certainly has that, and perhaps our favourite collar of the entire season’s efforts. In a world of plain round collars, United have a double-element v-neck that – and we have no idea whether this is intentional or not but to our mind it’s a bonus – brings to mind the devil’s trident from their badge.
Having praised the black, though, we’re not quite sure at first glance about what seem some very shiny black adidas stripes on the shoulders and sleeves. They’re slightly off-putting – notably on the long-sleeve version.
There’s also a print woven into the sleeves rather than body of the shirt, which is an unusual choice but one that works here. The last United home shirt we can recall with sleeves that differed from the main body of the shirt was 1998/99, and that seemed to work out well for everybody.
The design on the sleeves is, of course, a nod to their stadium because that seems to be what everyone is doing this season. Presumably that means after one wash it will have all holes in it.
Hilarious japes aside, excellent shirt this. Unmistakably United, significantly different to – and we’re going to say better than – Liverpool’s own adidas effort.
1) Leeds United
For some reason that baffles and – if we’re honest – infuriates us, adidas have apparently decided in the last year or so to devote a lot of their very best work to Leeds United.
Last year’s away kit was an all-timer, and this year’s home kit for their Premier League return even manages to nail our least favourite trend – the local inspiration.
𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 🤝 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 pic.twitter.com/j7dPDvkwvA
— Leeds United (@LUFC) July 4, 2025
The collar and cuff details based on the Lowfields Tunnel tiles are beautifully done on another shirt that already looks destined for classic status.