The five worst Manchester United kits in Premier League historyplaceholder image
The five worst Manchester United kits in Premier League history | Getty Images
Ranking the worst shirts ever worn by Manchester United in the Premier League era.
With the new season finally upon us, we decided over the last week that we should review the Top 10 best and worst new football kits that our favourite players will be wearing for the next year of our lives – and we came to the indisputable conclusion that one of Manchester City’s new shirts is among the most awful ever to be released into the wild.
We were also rather nice about Manchester United’s new tops, which look pretty sharp this season, and that made us wonder whether we shouldn’t redress the balance a little by looking at some of the fashion crimes committed over in the red half of Manchester over the years. Although they’re easily the best-looking side in the city this year, that hasn’t always been the case.
These are, in our opinion, the five worst football kits to be worn by Manchester United since the beginning of the Premier League – although honestly, not one of them are half as bad as that new City third shirt. Arrests should be made for that one.
5. 2018/19 Home
Look, it’s not hard to design Manchester United’s home kit, and Adidas have generally kept it simple since taking over as kit manufacturer in 2015. Just get the right shade of red, add a little black or white trim, call it a day. It’s a proven recipe that doesn’t need any extra seasoning to be added.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the one time Adidas did decide to get a little spicy, they produced probably the worst home shirt Manchester United have worn over the past few decades.
The black hoops running up from the base of the top were meant to blend in with the shorts, but not only did that look rather ugly in its own right but the designers forgot that many people would be wearing the jersey outside of the context of full kit. If you had a pair of jeans on, it looked like the printer had run out of ink halfway through. An idea that simply didn’t work in practice.
4. 1992/93 Away
When a new footballing era dawned with the foundation of the Premier League in 1992, United decided to step forth into the brave new world dressed as badly as humanly possible, at least when they weren’t at Old Trafford.
This muddy-looking dark blue effort used a sort of mottled pseudo-tie dye effect to make the rest of the patterning and design incredibly indistinct, which isn’t a bad thing given that the design concept was simply to slap a massive Manchester United club crest down the right side of the shirt and call it a day as though that looked good.
To make an already bad kit far worse, Umbro even repeated the pattern on the shorts for maximum hideousness – throw in some plain black shorts and some matching sleeve trim and it might just have been possible to save this, but everything from the detailing to the general idea to the execution was simply wrong. An experiment which was mercifully never repeated.
3. 1996-98 Away
Manchester United may not have repeated the 1992/93 monstrosity specifically, but it didn’t dissuade them from continuing to wear blue change kits – generally, however, Umbro were at least smart enough not to outfit their clients in anything that really looked like a Manchester City shirt. Except for two years in the middle of the Nineties.
Umbro actually designed City’s kits during this period, too, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that they just gave United a rejected design for their cross-city rivals and hoped that they wouldn’t notice. One can argue that the blue is darker than City’s usual kits, and they’d be right, but still… this is unmistakably a Manchester City shirt. Being worn by Manchester United. For two years. It’s like Sir Alex Ferguson lost a drunken bet.
Even without the associations with their rivals, this would be a pretty bad kit. It’s too baggy, the sleeve stripes are in the wrong place, and it looks like a kit that made sense when drawn in two dimensions but should have been sent back to the drawing board once the first prototype came out of the sewing machine. Wrong on a few different levels.
2. 1995/96 Away
The infamous 'invisible' grey shirt in action. They lost this game against Liverpool, too.placeholder image
The infamous 'invisible' grey shirt in action. They lost this game against Liverpool, too. | Getty Images
Look, United didn’t do brilliantly with their change strips during the Nineties, and Umbro were responsible for a few disasters – but this one was so bad that Ferguson even went so far as to accuse it of costing them an entire match.
Losing 3-0 to Southampton at half-time, United came out in different shirts after their legendary manager claimed that it impacted their performance because the players couldn’t see each other properly. Nobody bought the excuse, and the change didn’t prevent United from losing the game, but it did give this drab grey number lasting infamy.
The real reason that grey kits aren’t exactly a regular sight in football, of course, has less to do with the notion that they camouflage your team-mates than it does with the fact that they just don’t look very nice. This kit is dullness personified. It’s the same design as the tired old armchair that your grandfather used to sit in and which nobody ever had the heart to throw out. It’s just rubbish.
1. 2020/21 Third
Not all of United’s kit crimes are historic offences, and the statue of limitations certainly hasn’t yet passed for inflicting this eye-gouger on the public five short years ago. At least when their players were sporting the Epileptic Zebra look they could certainly see each other.
If Adidas had picked one lane with the stripes and stuck with it, this probably wouldn’t be too painful to look at, but the hideous mish-mash that they opted for, which stripes getting bigger and smaller at arbitrary points raises serious questions about the designer’s sanity. Why is the shirt ‘halved’ a third of the way across the chest? Why do the lines continue on one sleeve but not the other? Have you taken your medication today?
The end result is a shirt that looks like the experimental paint they used to put on battleships to make them harder to see against the horizon, and a kit which probably would have caused occasional seizures in the crowd had it not mercifully been used during the Covid season, when people were forced to maintain physical distance between themselves and anybody wearing this - not that anyone would have needed asking twice. This shirt needed a health warning, and ideally it needs to never be seen ever again.
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