Ranking the best and worst Club World Cup home kits: Divorcee flair, pixel madness and flawless Tunisian flair

New York Times

a day ago

The revamped Club World Cup is effectively a brand new tournament and with a fresh competition comes a selection of mostly new kits.
For this summer's 32-team extravaganza in the United States, teams are allowed to play in new looks, whether that be special-edition tournament-only strips or what they'll be strutting their stuff in for the entirety of the 2025-26 season. Or, should they wish, they can carry on wearing the same shirts as they have done already this year.
Whatever the approach of each of these Club World Cup competitors, nothing can spare them from the critical eye of The Athletic's Nick Miller, who has ranked all 32 home strips from worst to best.
If you've ever been on holiday to a place where English football is popular but isn't necessarily touched by stringent copyright laws, you might be familiar with this sort of merchandise. Essentially, this looks like a very unofficial Chelsea shirt, designed by someone who knows two things: that they play in royal blue and that Chelsea is in London, and so has produced something that you might expect to see on a roadside stall somewhere, hanging next to a top that says: "MY MUM WENT TO LONDON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT" on it. It might as well have a British bulldog, Big Ben and a picture of the Queen on it.
Oh. What is…oh. The first instinct is that this looks like the pixels from a not-especially-good 1980s computer game, which…well, that could be a compliment but it's not intended as one here. Having looked a little closer, what the two vertical flashes coming up from the bottom resemble is a person doing a double-bird flip, a pair of middle fingers raised high in the sky, but filmed with one of those heat-sensitive cameras. Not for me, this one.
We'll have to get used to not patronising Auckland City, which would be an easy thing to do considering they're actual part-timers off to play against some of the greatest footballers on Earth. And so it is with their kit. You could just pat them on the head and say, "Isn't this nice? Bless them taking time off work to come all this way and wear their little shirt"…but that would be disingenuous, so it's best to just say this one isn't great. It feels like the checkerboard design is something you need to go all-in on: the strength is the contrast, not this 'blue and slightly lighter blue' combination. Sorry, guys.
What's going on here? Clubs that have a traditional, set format for their shirt who then try to 'mix it up a bit' can go one of two ways: either their bold gamble pays off and they actually create something nice and original, or they just look rather too try-hard, like a recent divorcee trying to jazz up his bachelor pad with some decor that makes him seem younger. It's fine: you're middle-aged, you're set in your ways, lots of people like that sort of thing. Inter: stop mucking around with your stripes, you look ridiculous.
There's something just slightly off with this. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, though. Are there too many elements stacked on top of each other for the central badge/kitmaker logo/sponsor's name placing to work? Is it that there's not enough contrast, that it's too red? Is it that the collar is quite unusual but doesn't really pop because it's the same colour as the main body of the shirt? Am I overthinking this entirely because, after all, it's just a football kit? All of the above are possible.
Good lord, no. While it's to be admired that Juventus keep offering nods to their original colours of pink, which they wore until 1905, when an Englishman brought a shipment of old black and white striped Notts County shirts to Italy, this isn't a good way of doing that. There's too much happening: if you're going to bring in a striking detail like a pink trim, you need to keep the rest of the shirt pretty simple, which they could have done by using basic, block stripes. As it is, the stripes are asymmetrical and fuzzy, making the whole thing look a bit of a mess.
This is the first - and, as you'll be able to discern from its position in our rankings, the worst - of Puma's special edition kits for the Club World Cup, it's all a collaboration with New York designer KidSuper who, because I am 41 years old, I had never heard of before starting work on this article. Having revealed my age, the following will inevitably read like the thoughts of a middle-aged man who doesn't understand young-people things, but... what's happening here? The blurb from Puma claims the daubs in the bottom half are a depiction of the mountains that form the backdrop to Monterrey's home stadium in Mexico, but they look more like a Rorschach test. After staring into the patterns for a while, I can see…that I should stop being such an old duffer.
This shirt, part of the same Puma/KidSuper collection, isn't far behind the Monterrey one in the 'it's no good' stakes. This seems like a classic example of a decent core idea that has been executed quite badly: the stripes, the crescent-moon motif, the colours - all nice, but it would have been even nicer had they not let a child in elementary art class actually put it together. It sort of looks like a still-wet painting that has been stood upright and the colours have thus run down the shirt.
From an English perspective, it's quite strange seeing Umbro's name and logo on a shirt from Brazil. It's a brand that you generally associate with English clubs - and England; in the 1990s, with affordable boots when you were a kid; with a particular sort of basic training wear that has migrated onto east London fashionistas. This feels like a shirt designed for kids: very bold and thick blocks, the sort of football shirt Fisher Price might design. Which isn't to say it's bad, it's just…well, you might feel like a toddler while wearing it.
One danger with having a repeated template, apart from just making yourself look quite unimaginative, is that you end up with a team who look like they are wearing another club's shirt - as if they've showed up for an away game and the kit man has clean forgotten to bring their gear, so the opposition have to lend them something. Take this Al Ahly jersey, which looks a lot like Benfica's from a few years ago. Which, again, is not to say it's bad, it's just that a team's aesthetic can form a big part of their broader identity, so when two sides look so similar, that is eroded.
Hmmm. Tricky one. It is very basic. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But it is very basic. Which can be a virtue. But it is very basic. I can't quite make up my mind whether this is too basic, or just a nice, clean, simple, uncomplicated…hang on, these are all just synonyms for basic, aren't they? It is very basic…
Similar vibes here. This is clearly a nice shirt. Good clean lines, nothing too complicated, a little detail down the sides but nothing too much to really get excited about. And yet I've been staring at it for five minutes and I can't think of a single thing to really say about it. It's like meeting a very attractive but quite vacant person. The line between simple and boring is about the width of a spider's silk, to the point that judging which side of it football shirts fall is essentially arbitrary, but for me this lands on the wrong side.
A marker of your advancing years is when you see a football shirt with a 'retro' look, one that gives a nod to a kit from the way, way, way distant past, and you realise you were around for the design being referenced when it was new. This jersey thus inspires strong flashbacks of Ruud van Nistelrooy, of Fernando Gago, or Fabio Cannavaro, of Madrid players from a very specific time. But forget this old man's contemplation of his mortality: is it nice? Well…yes…sort of… but that slightly strange meshy, honeycomb background design does spoil it a little, as does the grey detailing under the arms.
You don't get many purple football kits, do you? Is it because they generally look like something a referee in an under-15s Sunday league match should be wearing? Or, arguably even worse than that, a third-choice goalkeeper's jersey? Possibly. There is actually quite an interesting story behind this one: Al Ain started life in the United Arab Emirates wearing green and white halves, then changed to red after merging with another club, then in 1977, they played purple-sporting Belgian side Anderlecht in a friendly and thought their colours looked quite smart, so they switched. Interesting, no? You'll notice I haven't actually written anything about this design which is because it's…well, it's fine, isn't it? Not much more than that.
Yeah, this is perfectly clean, and manages to not look boring despite only being black and white with a few grey dabs here and there. It's just beautifully ordered: the stripes are the same size, the collar is strong, and the cuffs are, too. You don't see many Reebok kits these days and on this evidence, that's a bit of a shame, because it could teach a few other companies some much-needed lessons about the virtues of 'less is more'.
Adidas seems really big on pinstripes this year. This is by no means a criticism because in general, they tend to look pretty good, but the danger is that its shirts can start to look pretty formulaic. As is the case with this Ulsan one, which is nice but very much in cookie-cutter territory: as more Western teams' shirts are released throughout the summer, you'll be seeing plenty more of this design, just in slightly different colours. That said, the South Korean side have very nice colours.
Palmeiras have also got a special design from Puma for the Club World Cup, but as far as we can tell, at the time of writing, that will be their away shirt, and the home jersey they use in the tournament will be the same one they've been wearing in their ongoing 2025 season back in Brazil. That shirt is pretty nice and, from a distance, could pass as something from the 1950s (meant as a compliment), but peer a little closer and you can see an assortment of background designs, incorporating various crests. It's a pretty good way of introducing a little variety into a fairly straightforward, classic design, even if that variety could be quite easy to miss.
Manchester City have joined the other Puma clubs in having a special-edition kit for the Club World Cup but perhaps rather shrewdly, theirs is the away kit. The home shirt they will be wearing in the U.S. is next season's jersey, which is pretty nice. If you're a sash fundamentalist, you could argue that it should be left to those who commit to it - your River Plates, your Perus, at-a-push your Crystal Palaces - rather than just dipping in for one season, but this works quite nicely, even if it does look a bit like it's been applied by a half-hearted painter-and-decorator. It's also exactly the right shade of blue for City, which is crucial.
It's almost certainly too grand to describe a kit design as a 'reset' but if you can do that, then this is one to do it for. Atletico have mixed things up in recent years, with all sorts of blue flashes and shoulder details and waving stripes acting as variations on the standard form, but this is a back-to-basics, straight up and down, red and white-striped shirt. Maybe you do need the context of previous years' experiments to properly appreciate that, which most people probably won't have, but it is a pretty lovely thing.
Earlier, we mentioned that Al Ahly's shirt looks like it belongs to Benfica: well, the good news is that Adidas has given the Lisbon side themselves one that is different enough that they're not going to just look exactly the same. This is a lovely number, striking the sometimes difficult balance between incorporating a lot of elements - the two-tone collar, the under-arm detail, the three stripes along the shoulders - without making the overall shirt look cluttered. This is how you do clean and classic without being boring.
It's a shame in some ways that the Sounders won't be wearing their away shirt more, if only because it looks like a fleece. But the good news is that their home jersey is a peach of a thing, although it does fall into that 'shouldn't really work but it does' category. 'Green background with thin darker green and turquoise stripes? Have you lost your mind?'. Well, maybe, but sometimes things that shouldn't go together really do go together. The heart wants what it wants.
A black football shirt can be extremely difficult to get right, partly because when they get wet through sweat, rain or whatever, they can quite easily start to resemble those PVC trousers that look good on a maximum of three people worldwide. This is a pretty good version, broadly because it has one - and only one - strong contrast colour, in this case gold, which is used relatively judiciously. The pinstripes work nicely, the trim is good, the club and manufacturer's badges are in keeping with the rest of the shirt - yes, good. Well done, indeed.
PSG are a legitimately brilliant team these days, so it's a bit more difficult to be sniffy about them being more of a brand than a football club. But they are very keen to remind you they're from... PARIS!, while saying the Saint-Germain part rather more quietly, aren't they? They've had much less subtle nods to the Eiffel Tower in their shirts before, most notably the away jersey from a few seasons ago when the monument was daubed right across the middle of it. The lattice pattern down the middle of this new effort, a nod to the steel construction of the tower, is at least slightly more artful, and furthermore is pretty visually pleasing. Although don't stare at it for too long: you'll go cross-eyed.
A quick glance through Pachuca's kit history reveals a lot of chopping and changing and some pretty eccentric choices. They've bounced between hoops, halves and stripes, with a weird T-shaped design one season and some truly hideous sponsor's logos. But happily they seem to have calmed down and settled on a pretty solid 'stripes with block colours on the sleeves' approach here. This is one of those shirts that you could picture a team sporting at pretty much any time since football clubs started taking kit design seriously: which is to say, it's good. The classics never go out of style.
The good thing about choosing pink as the colour of your home jersey is that you don't have to work especially hard, in terms of kit design, to be distinctive. And, happily, Adidas hasn't fallen into that trap for the 2025 Inter Miami shirt, which they've been wearing for the opening months of the ongoing MLS season: just a simple two-tone in thick stripes, with the equally straightforward but distinctive contrast of the black trim and logos. No need to overcomplicate things. Should Miami be playing in this tournament? From a meritocratic standpoint, definitely not. But at least they're going to look good for as long as they are in it.
Do you ever feel completely taken in by some obvious corporate nonsense? There's a big sign outside the Nike store in central London at the moment, promoting their running range, which says 'Hate every second, love every mile'. Clearly utter guff, but you can imagine if you were running a marathon, that sort of thing would inspire you. Anyway, Puma claims this design blends 'warm, sunlit tones with cooler shades to reflect the club's signature style' which 'captures the rhythm, energy, and joy of Sundowns football'. Also complete tosh, but you know what? I like this shirt, so I don't really care.
As it turns out, I am quite the dupe for the marketing blurb on these Puma special editions. 'Alpine beauty with a New York edge', begins its description of the Red Bull Salzburg kit, which 'reimagines the iconic Edelweiss flower with sweeping strokes of ivory, lemon, and baby blue'. And I'm swallowing it whole, because…well, it's just a really nice shirt, isn't it? We could get very 'proper football man' and say flowers don't have a place on kits, but come on, let's have a slightly more progressive interpretation of masculinity, shall we?
The delicate balance of having a kit with an iconic design and not wanting to spoil that but equally ensuring every new version is a bit different and stands out must be a delicate needle to thread. But Adidas has managed that with this River Plate kit, simply by flipping the positioning of the company's own iconic design, the three stripes, to wrap around the sleeves rather than run vertically down them. It works perfectly, not interfering with the traditional elements of the River shirt while at the same time making this particular one distinctive. Yes, please.
This is the best of the Puma special-edition kits, at least in part because it genuinely looks like a Dortmund shirt, incorporating the more flashy 'fashion' elements more naturally than the others. Maybe this is because Dortmund often do mix up the designs on their home shirts, so this sort of departure doesn't feel quite as jarring. I couldn't really tell you what is going on with the pattern across the chest, shoulders and sleeves, other than it looking like a child's potato print, but I can tell you that it looks really good.
It's the piping that does it. Well-placed piping can make a football shirt, particularly when in a well-selected colour which pops enough on its own that you don't have to use too much of it. Less (piping) is more. Without it, this would be a perfectly fine, clean design, but those subtle lines running from the collar down towards the armpits just add a little something extra. Top class, as you might expect from Boca.
Proper stuff, this. You often read stories about how, when newly-formed clubs were figuring out what colours to wear, they chose something they thought would intimidate the opposition. Maybe I'm just being duped (again), because all of the announcement photos for this kit have the players mocked up as being taller than 30-storey buildings, but this does feel quite intimidating. Bold lines, bright red colours, tight cuffs: this lot from Morocco look like they mean business. You don't get that many Kappa kits these days, and when you see what they're capable of, you realise what a shame that is. Especially when...
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You'll have to excuse my Meg Ryan impression, but this shirt is simply magnificent. A stunner, a beauty, you feel like applauding - which would be weird, but still. The red and yellow complement each other, but are brilliantly offset by the black trim, which itself is judiciously used. The background pattern is wonderful too: a traditional Tunisian design that jazzes the shirt up just so, and for extra brilliance, it's repeated on their second and third kits. A wonderfully thought-through Kappa design, perfectly executed. Almost flawless.
(Top photos: Bayern Munich and Getty Images; design: Kelsea Petersen)