Counting down the five worst Arsenal shirts of the Premier League era ahead of a new season.
Their crisp and clean new third kit made our rankings and we could easily have included their lovely ‘blue lightning’ away jersey as well. They’re probably going to be the most stylish team in the Premier League in the coming year. It hasn’t always been that way.
The Gunners have had their share of fashion disasters over the years, and we thought it would be fun to look at the five worst shirts that Arsenal have worn since football was invented back in 1992. Let’s dive in…
5. 2016/17 Home
Look, designing an Arsenal home shirt shouldn’t require advanced qualifications. In fact, it should be just about the easiest thing anyone at Puma had to do all year back when they were the kit manufacturers. Red shirt, white sleeves, little bit of trim if you must, job done.
But someone at puma decided to try and get clever one year, and it led to what’s really the only truly dodgy home shirt the Gunners have had to wear in the modern era. And there’s really only one thing wrong with it. But it’s so wrong.
That faint stripe right down the medal made it look as though everyone wearing it had produced a specific and rather unpleasant sweat stain, without offering any aesthetic benefits whatsoever. It didn’t tie in to other design elements, it wasn’t part of a grander vision, it was just a weird dark line that made the whole thing look a little bit stupid. It was annoying to look at, as much as anything, like a little bit of dust in your eye that you just couldn’t quite get rid of.
4. 2020/21 Away
We can sort of see what Adidas were going for here, with a marble pattern that was probably designed to evoke a sense of style and class that would make David Luiz feel more like Michaelangelo’s David – but what it really did was make every Arsenal player wearing it look like they had a nasty nosebleed.
It ends up as a tacky person’s attempt at classy, a cheap person’s idea of expensive – and the use of crimson for the ‘veins’ makes it all feel like someone then came along and tried to make it all look tough, somehow, as though someone liked the idea of a classical sculpture vibe but wanted a bit more Terry Butcher in there.
Marble and blood. A bizarre combination, and ultimately a pretty big miss. That said, it’s not actually the worst mistake that Adidas have contrived to make when working for Arsenal, as we’ll soon see…
3. 2023/24 Away
…Very soon, in fact, because this garish outfit from just a couple of years ago is surely worse. At least the marble shirt was a relatively innocuous kind of bad. This garish kit is offensively face bad and right in your face while being so.
One day, perhaps, the various mainstream kit manufacturers will finally figure out that neon colours just don’t work on football shirts, and that neon yellow will never be a good base for a successful jersey. The day hadn’t arrived as of 2023, however, and the combination of Traffic Warden Yellow, electric blue and psychedelic swirls of black combine to make this look like a cursed Magic Eye picture.
Nothing about this works, everything about it hurts to look at, and few Premier League kits have generated quite as many migraines as this one. Perhaps the designers hoped that it would induce vomiting in the opposition. It certainly worked on us while we were sat at home minding our own business.
2. 2012/13 Away
The Arsenal squad express their pleasure with the 2012/13 away kitplaceholder image
The Arsenal squad express their pleasure with the 2012/13 away kit | Arsenal FC via Getty Images
Every once in a while, an intern (we assume) at a company like Nike will wonder why we don’t have more football kits in, say, a purple and black colour scheme, go and make one, and immediately get their answer. Unfortunately, unsuspecting teams sometimes get forced to wear the results. Arsenal were among them.
This 2010s kit made Arsenal look less like a group of football players and more like a packet of evil liquorice allsorts, with the circular collar and the tiny out-of-place pop of red on the sleeves adding some gruesome details to what would have been a rather nauseating shirt even without them.
Some colour combinations simply don’t belong on a football pitch, and should be reserved for… Well, in honesty, purple and black probably shouldn’t be reserved for anything, just like this kit shouldn’t be reserved for anything other than the bin. Not all colour pairings work.
1. 2014/15 Third
If that last shirt made Arsenal look like something Bertie Bassett would create on a dark night of the soul, this one from Puma made them looked like a squad of possessed lollipops. This isn’t a kit, it’s the wrapper from a childhood penny suite that everyone always left in its little drawer.
A sort of post-cheap curry vomit yellow-green colour adds a dash of disgust to a kit whose helter-skelter pattern already induced a certain degree of motion sickness when seen in action, which was mercifully rarely.
Nothing about this shirt looks palatable, nothing about it makes sense, and it’s almost impossible to imagine how it crept through quality control. The only explanation – one perhaps made more plausible by the home kit a couple of years later – is that Puma were conducting a social experiment into how much Arsenal fans could take before they handed in their season tickets. It’s that or someone accidentally let a Spurs fan do the shirt.
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