Liverpool's third kit is the biggest winner of the season so far
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As the clock ticks past 93 minutes, Mo Salah slots home a penalty to secure three points. It's what Salah does best, only this time he's doing it in a fresh new look – Liverpool's third kit. The Egyptian king leaps up into the fresh Lancashire air and is immediately mobbed by a bunch of sea-green shirted teammates as they celebrate beating Burnley at the death.
For those uninitiated, club kits are a highly emotive topic among football fans. On the pitch, goals, contentious VAR decisions and great saves keep football fans on the edge of their seat. But off the field, few things generate more interest than new kit launches – home, away and third kits. It's why last week, football chat wasn't only centred around Alexander Isak making his debut for Liverpool – but whether he'd be doing so in their record-breaking third kit.
Major sportswear brands from Adidas to Nike to Puma, which sign lucrative partnership deals with teams to design their playing and training wear, have to tread a narrow tightrope when it comes to innovating on a team’s kit design while respecting the tradition and overall aesthetic of the club in question. This is made trickier still by the fact that these days, it's commonplace for major teams to release three new kits – sometimes more – per season.
“I’m obviously going to say Real Madrid and Arsenal, because I love those two clubs and spent an obscene amount of money on their countless Adidas collections,” said Master Tesfatsion, a sports journalist. “But surprisingly, I’ve loved what Adidas has done with Juventus. Last year’s third kit was my favourite of the season.”
While the scope for brands and clubs to experiment with the “home” and “away” strips is somewhat limited, the third kit has become a source of creativity. Some clubs have leaned in more than others, working with partners keen on breaking the mould. Kappa’s work with Venezia FC — before the team switched over to Nike’s NOCTA label — is a good example. The team’s 2023/24 season third kit, designed in collaboration with Mirko Borsche, was a beautiful homage to the city’s iconic gondoliers and their visual identity. It embodied the blueprint whereby football teams increasingly use their third kits to pay tribute to their local cultures and the identity of their supporters.
This is certainly the case for Adidas too. In recent years, the German sportswear giant has been a major, well-positioned beneficiary of the fashion trend that has seen football jerseys become full on fashion items, worn far and wide by people who may not even necessarily follow the team in question.
Clubs across football, alongside their sportswear partners, are also leaning into cultural themes when cooking up new kits. Tesfatsion believes Puma, another brand synonymous with footballing heritage, has been on a winning streak lately, noting the creativity of Sundowns FC’s Club World Cup kit and also the subtle flames in the stripes of AC Milan’s home kit this season, as particular standouts.
Ahead of the 2025/26 season, I travelled to Adidas HQ in Germany to sit down with one of the brains behind Adidas kit design, Jürgen Rank, a company veteran of 20 years who is likely responsible for just about every hit football kit in the past two decades. Rank, senior design director of Adidas’ football apparel division, talked me through the challenges and joys of the ever-evolving kit design process, and why the third kit is becoming increasingly important from a culture marketing perspective.
Adidas, which has made football equipment for elite players and teams dating back to the '60s, has leaned into — and oftentimes, led — this trend, getting increasingly experimental and artistic with its kit designs and lifestyle collections for its major partner clubs, which include the likes of Arsenal, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Manchester United.
Last season, for example, Adidas famously collaborated with London-based menswear brand Labrum, to create Arsenal’s away kit, a strip designed to celebrate the club’s long-held relationship with players from the African diaspora. It was a design that became an instant hit among Arsenal fans and regular football fashion fans alike, and perfectly summed up Adidas strategy to infuse its team kit, training and lifestyle collection designs with more of the classic Adidas fashion appeal. And with the 2026 World Cup in North America fast approaching – of which Adidas is a primary sponsor – football culture has never been more in focus in the mainstream.
How football kits are hitting the cultural zeitgeist
The design process for an upcoming season’s kits is a year-long process, which begins as soon as the previous season’s kits are finalised, explained Rank, sitting in a restricted area of Adidas’ sprawling campus in Herzogenaurach, Germany, just outside the city of Nuremberg. It’s a highly complex, multi-stage process, which involves many stakeholders, including designers, artists, and marketers, all operating within strict parameters laid out by the club, league and federations in question, such as limitations on colour schemes or silhouette construction.
“The home jersey is the holy grail, the highest identifier of any football club, which you have to treat with the utmost respect,” said Rank. “With the third kit, you have a bit more flexibility and a little more freedom to experiment with creative approaches.”
Last year, Adidas took a big step forward with the look and feel of its third kits, replacing the classic Adidas “three stripes” logo with its iconic trefoil insignia. The trefoil, long associated with the brand’s Originals line, instantly provided a fashion forward aesthetic to the jerseys’ design.
The approach appears to be working with fans and consumers. “I think Adidas has the juice right now,” said Tesfatsion. “I’ve actually enjoyed the separation of performance and lifestyle through the three stripes and trefoil. The trefoil provides the [fashion] versatility the performance line simply can’t, and these jerseys and pieces have become standouts in my closet.”
Icons like the trefoil represent little pockets of subcultural magic for brands like Adidas. Entire generations of sports fans grew up either intentionally or subliminally interacting with these old school logos that were associated with the star teams and athletes of days gone by. Reintegrating these nostalgic symbols into product design is proving to be a go-to strategy across the industry at large. Nike, for example, is in the midst of the revival of its T90 line, the iconic football product franchise from the 2000s, reminiscent of iconic commercials featuring Ronaldinho, Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney and true footballing grails like the Brazilian national team’s T90 kits which screamed joga bonito.
For the 2025/26 campaign, Adidas has worked with its major club partners to create designs which celebrated their heritage and history. It’s an approach akin to the one taken by designers at luxury brands – much like the big fashion houses, football teams have decades (sometimes centuries) of historic moments, quirky archival pieces and storied design codes that they can use as inspiration for new kit designs. But for Rank, Adidas' extensive archive is designed to be a source of creativity and forward thinking, rather than something to be relied upon to churn out retro kits and remakes.
“The aim is to create the future collective memory of football,” said Rank. “It’s about taking elements from the past which symbolise the beauty of the sport, but all in order to create something new.”
A major boost for Adidas came with its re-signing of Liverpool for the 2025/26 season, bringing the iconic pairing back together after a 13-year hiatus. And this weekend's game against Burnley marked the first time in 34 years since the Adidas trefoil and Liver bird featured on a kit together. Many of the previous era of Adidas-made Liverpool kits became cult classics and sports culture grails – hallmarks of Liverpool’s time with Carlsberg as its front of shirt sponsor. Many more iconic kits were created in the duo’s previous tenure working together between 1985 and 1996. It’s exactly in this spirit that the brand conceived the design for Liverpool’s third kit this season, which pays homage to the iconic green Liverpool kits of the 1990s, a throwback to the heyday Liverpudlian legends like Steve McManaman.
For Arsenal, Adidas created a third kit in homage to the iconic 2005/06 season, significant due to it being the club’s final season at its former stadium, Highbury, a beloved local landmark in North London. At the time, the club was under contract with Nike as its technical partner, producing the memorable burgundy home strip that season. The jersey features a classic collar and cuff design, and a detailed base layer which incorporates the colours and structural features of Highbury’s famous Art Deco edifice.
“I think Adidas has both leaned heavily into Arsenal’s storied past – it really understands the club’s “good old days” and the nostalgia factor, while keeping the designs modern and fresh with their away and third kits. It’s a refreshing mix of pushing the club’s kits forward in time while still nodding to the past,” said football analyst and creator Aaron West, a lifelong fan of the club.
Juventus’ third kit for the season takes inspiration from Turin’s vineyards, a key economic and cultural pillar of the region. The jersey carries a subtle grapevine design embossing. Real Madrid’s kit evokes the iconic blue of the seating inside the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, while Bayern’s is a tribute – co-created with German streetwear boutique BSTN – to the Marienplatz location, the famous building at which the club celebrates its numerous title wins. Manchester United’s third kit for the season was designed to transport fans back to a simpler time in kit design, allowing the club’s iconic design codes to shine through.
“We really see this work as a privilege, something that we can do for the clubs, for the fans, and truly invest a lot of thinking into it," says Rank. “The goal is to create jerseys that resonate with fans, combining authentic storytelling with beautiful design.”