Counting down the five worst Newcastle shirts of the Premier League era.
Recently, I compiled our Top 10s of the very best and very worst new football kits in world football, and one of the teams that nearly made the cut for the latter was Newcastle United.
In the end, there were worse out there than Newcastle’s divisive new away shirt – looking at your eye-gougingly ugly third kit, Manchester City - but it set me to thinking about some of the shockers we’ve seen on Tyneside down the years, because Newcastle have had more than their fair share of bad kits.
These are, in my opinion, the five worst jerseys inflicted on Newcastle’s unfortunate players over the years. Just don’t come in here expecting to find the 2009/10 ‘custard cream’ kit that so many supporters hated – you’re in the hands of the only person in Britain who loved that top. Besides, custard creams are delicious.
5. 1997/98 Away
Steve Watson models the bold but abysmal 97/98 away jersey.placeholder image
Steve Watson models the bold but abysmal 97/98 away jersey. | Getty Images
One of the reasons I thought about compiling this list in the first place was that Newcastle’s third kit this season (which we think is actually pretty nice) was loosely inspired by the shirt above – a top that precisely nobody was clamouring to bring back.
Granted, they’ve tweaked the blue, lost the green and orange stripe this time around, and they’ve mercifully relocated the sponsor’s logo back to a sensible position, but we’re pretty surprised that anybody even saw potential in the colour scheme, a combination of three shades that nobody else in human history ever thought to be worth putting together again.
It’s a mild surprise that everybody else in human history was arguably wrong, based on Adidas’ efforts this year. Whoever chose to hark back to this rather horrible kit was either a genius or a maniac, and we still don’t know which.
4. 2014/15 Home
It’s very hard to go too far wrong with a Newcastle home kit (although Adidas’ pale blue trim this year gives it a crack), but when the Magpies do end up with a rubbish home kit, it’s usually because there was a particularly awful sponsor splashed across the front.
Not that the ugly logo of a payday loan company was the only thing wrong with this kit. I can see what Puma were going for with the plunging ‘extended v-neck’ look, but it delves too deep into the rest of the kit and ends up looking… just a little bit jarring. Sometimes, a shirt simply looks wrong.
Maybe if the collar had mirrored the design it might have worked out, but even then it likely would have ended up ruined by the fact that these shirts were supplied to the players absolutely skin tight to the point where they all looked like they were in shapewear, and with every expense seemingly spared, its poor quality helpfully demonstrated by the Premier League patch falling off of Jonas Gutíerrez’s arm above.
3. 2020/21 Third
Let’s start with the most obvious issue with this disappointing shirt – it’s a goalkeeper’s top which had been left unused from the Nineties, and not a design which an outfield player should ever have been compelled to wear. Miguel Almirón looks like he’s getting ready to handle a high cross in that photo, and he’s literally dribbling his way through a tackle. Wrongness comes in many mildly irritating forms.
It also comes in the form of a black, purple and neon yellow colour scheme, another triumvirate of tints which should never have been permitted to come together on the same article of clothing. Lob yet another awful sponsor into the equation – this time a dodgy gambling company picked out in the colours of a lollipop lady’s uniform – and you end up with a shirt that is unlikely to inspire many future designs. Mike Ashley committed many sins, but failing to consider the aesthetic qualities of the club’s sponsors was surely the worst.
2. 2006/07 Away
What is it about Newcastle and a desire to throw a seemingly random melange of colours into the same shirt? What is at about Adidas that makes them so keen to commit these crimes? And why does this look so much like a 2000s white ball cricket top?
If we were watching Kevin Pietersen smashing sixes around the park in this thing, we’d probably… well, still think it was fairly ugly, to be honest, but the early Twenty20 franchise look most definitely didn’t suit football. That said, based on the perhaps poorly-chosen photo above, it may have very specifically suited Antoine Sibierski? Maybe a carefully-polished chrome dome is what you need to pull the whole ensemble together.
For those of us not born with the male pattern baldness gene, however, it was just another hodge-podge of clashing colours added to the shirt in seemingly random places. Did the collar really need to melt into the chest piece? No, it probably did not.
1. 2014/15 Third
This is the second kit we’ve pulled from the frankly cursed 2014/15 season, and I honestly could have picked any of them for our hall of shame – the grey away kit was pretty grim, too, and even the goalkeeper’s outfits were rubbish. But this is surely the very worst of the lot.
It’s looks like somebody made a Blackburn kit violently ill. It’s the colour of sea sickness. Plenty of kits look bad, but few makes the person looking at it feel actively bilious. It’s astonishing that the designer responsible for this wasn’t fired on the spot. Perhaps the person in charge of giving it the green light was from Sunderland.
Plus it’s got all of the same problems as the home jersey. That godawful sponsor’s logo. The fact that it looked to be about one delicates cycle away from destruction at all times. Take all that and throw in some short the shade of Soviet toothpaste and you get a real horrorshow. Compared to the visual violence inflicted by this kit, the use of ‘Saudi green’ seems positively benign.
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