Counting down the five worst Everton shirts ever worn in the Premier League.
When we began reviewing the best and worst new football kits of the 2025/26 season, we generally found ourselves impressed by the quality of shirts on display in the Premier League – with the notable exception of Everton.
While it would be harsh to describe the home or third kits as crimes against fashion, Castore’s designs are definitely among the weakest jerseys of the year – and it set us thinking about some of the worst shirts that the Toffees have worn since football was invented with the foundation of the Premier League back in 1992.
Generally, Everton are one of those clubs who have kept things simple with their kits, taking few risks and as such avoiding too many real clangers – but we still found five shirts that we’re glad we’ll never have to look at again. Here are the ugliest tops we saw at Goodison Park down the years…
5. 2017/18 Away
Nothing about this kit is particularly pleasant. The uniform pale grey colour that’s the colour of mildly inclement weather. The contrast with the slightly darker grey shorts, designed by someone who came to the conclusion that grey really goes with grey and who should, therefore, probably not be allowed to design things. The two clashing shades of blue in the trim and the sponsor’s logo. The distinct cheapness of the entire ensemble, which looks like a template training top.
The result is a kit which radiates drabness from every stitch and which feels like it came about because Umbro decided to repurpose some cheap t-shirts that had been sitting in a corner of their warehouse for a while because nobody wanted to buy them. There was a reason for that, and it was needlessly cruel to inflict them upon Everton fans, who suffer quite enough without having to endure double grey kits.
4. 2007/08 Home
The 2007/08 Everton home kit is a testament to the sheer amount of damage that a single small design detail can do to what would otherwise have been an unremarkable but entirely inoffensive shirt – and the result is probably the only Everton home kit that was really rather bothersome. Until this year’s, anyway.
The offender is the bizarre strip of zebra print hidden away beneath the players’ arms. Most of the time, it was invisible, but whenever it appeared – say, when they were celebrating goals, which was something Everton actually got to experience back then – there was a sudden flash of the interior decor of a particularly classless brothel.
The lesson that one hopes Umbro learned from this shirt was that the only place zebra print has ever looked anything other than hideously tacky is on an actual, living zebra. No other living creature can carry it off. Even prime Mikel Arteta.
3. 2017/18 Third
Not only is this the third consecutive kit from Umbro on this list - we should be fair and point out that they weren’t responsible for the two very worst kits here - but it’s the second change strip from the 2017/18 season alone, which was apparently the year that fashion forgot half of Merseyside.
The big question here is simply why anyone involved in professional clothing design ever contemplated putting purple and black together. What did they think would happen? That the result wouldn’t look like a teenage goth’s discarded sweater? There are reasons that certain colour combinations didn’t take off.
Chuck in some neon yellow trim and you have the recipe for a minor horrorshow, one so bad that Wayne Rooney immediately left the club for a second time. OK, that probably wasn’t the primary motivation behind his move to the United States. But it might have been a factor, and we wouldn’t have blamed him one bit.
2. 2001/02 Away
A sweaty Steve Watson challenges Martin Reuijser for the ball.placeholder image
A sweaty Steve Watson challenges Martin Reuijser for the ball. | Getty Images
Here we go – grey again. Not two-tone grey, this time, and no ugly blue trim, but this dreary attempt at a top commits a fatal error that makes it considerably worse than our earlier entry, even if the colour has the decency to be consistent – it’s baggy.
The outsized cut of the top, a weirdly common feature of football kits of the era, and the fact that sweat stains stood out a mile on it, contrived to provide the impression that the players were wearing sodden used dishcloths as they played. In the first minute, it merely looked a bit dull. By the time the players had sprinted in it for an hour and a half, it looked positively disgusting.
On the plus side, at least this year’s Manchester City third kit means that this rather awful effort won’t go down in history as the worst grey kit that Puma have ever forced a football team to wear. It could have been worse…
1. 2023/24 Away
…In fact, it could have been the away shirt from the 2023/24 season, a rare swing and a miss from Hummel, who usually did good work at Everton. This salmon pink and blue number, however, ended up being less than the sum of its parts, which is quite impressive given how bad most of the parts were in the first place.
Everton have toyed with pink kits a few times, ranging from the excessively bright (the controversial neon 2010/11 number, which was a consideration for this list) to the rather pleasing (the 2022/23 away top) but this is the only time that they have opted for a sort of orangey take on the inside of a fish. For that, we can be grateful.
Throw in the weird stripes with their jarringly busy design and we end up with a kit that was deeply challenging to look at, with none of the design elements popping out and all of them congealing into a single hideous mass of bad ideas. Yes, some of this year’s kits are pretty poor. But at least they aren’t this bad.
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