Ranking every Premier League away kit for 2025-26: Batman shirt, inspired by a leisure centre, and… brown

New York Times

16 hours ago

Our keen eye has been cast over the Premier League's home kits, so now it's time for the away outfits.
This is typically where chances are taken, outlandish designs come in, shirts that could be brilliant and beloved classics or could be complete duds. As a rule they tend to be more interesting…but will these be?
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This season we have a garish copy of a cult classic, a shirt inspired by Pot Pourri, a Batman black shirt, one that looks like the walls of a provincial leisure centre, and perhaps the biggest disparity in quality between an away and a home design we've ever seen.
Read on, and we're sure you won't be shy of telling us what you think…
You have to marvel at the brass neck of football clubs. We all know why Newcastle's away shirt is green. It's not OK that their owners are using the club to spruce up the image of Saudi Arabia, to provide a glossy sheen to their seat of soft power, to use kits as walking billboards for their regime. But it would be insulting to anyone's intelligence to pretend this shirt is green for any other reason. Over to the Newcastle website, then, which declares that the shirt "draws inspiration from Newcastle's iconic riverside", and "features a striking green arch inspired by the legendary Tyne Bridge". Get lost. Do they think that sort of thing is funny? Or that people won't notice? Aesthetically, the shirt is fine, but if you're wondering why it's in last place, that's why.
Oh. Oh no. Oh dear no. The history of the brown football shirt is short: Coventry City's away top of the late 1970s inspired some misty-eyed affection but then again, some people get nostalgic for the days of rationing, so you can't necessarily trust that. St Pauli's home shirt is brown (although this season, with white stripes), but those guys are a law unto themselves. If you want to tell their ultras they look stupid, then go for it, but I'm not going to. Otherwise, there's not much else, and there's probably a good reason for that. This shirt's only redeeming feature is the nice and striking bee logo that differs slightly from their usual crest, which is a bee inside a circle. But… they could quite easily have done that in a different colour. Bad. Very, very bad.
Ah. Hmmm. Yes. Well. Forest's home kit this season is a pleasing nod to one of years past, a nice and clean design that is different to the last few years but is still identifiably 'Forest'. The away kit is… none of those things. The background design is a reference to the city's historical lace industry, which is a nice enough touch, the slight flaw being that it looks horrible and, somehow, quite boring for a shirt coated in an elaborate pattern. Maybe they would've got away with it if the Adidas stripes on the sleeves were the same blue contrast colour as the crest but for some reason, they're basically the same as the body colour. No bueno.
Nope. Palace have announced this as a 'celebration' shirt, rather than their official away kit. Either way, this is clearly the shirt of a mid-range Championship team from 2005, rather than one embarking on European competition. Should that matter? Is it silly to expect a club to adhere to an arbitrary dress code that applies in some way to their general status? Of course it is, but, to bastardise the old Jerry Seinfeld quote, I'm ranking laundry here, so silly is probably the starting point. The thin stripy bits on the collars and cuffs and the piping around the shoulder redeem things slightly, but not enough. The important point is that this is not a good football shirt.
You know in some films or TV shows where they will do a bit in black and white, which then dissolves into colour to symbolise a change in mood, or season, or something? No? Trust me, it happens. Can't remember any specific films, but just… trust me. Anyway, this shirt looks like the first part of that: the dreary, colourless past before life brightens up significantly. The blurb from Adidas declares that "on away days, this jersey reminds fans of the club's home city"… what, grey and boring? Now, I'm not a particular fan of Birmingham as a place, but you'd think if the club's kit was going to pay homage to it, they would find something a little more interesting than this.
Yeesh. Bold. Still, you can't fault the commitment to the bit here: this shirt is a tribute to Fulham's striking 1999-2000 away kit, to the point where it's not really a tribute and more a direct copy, down to the placement of the contrast dark blue sections under the armpits and even using Fulham's old crest. The only real difference I can see is there's a buttoned collar as opposed to an open one. Is it good, though? Well, no, not really, if you're judging it by the standard of, "Do I actually want to be seen wearing this by people I know?" but it will have a cult following and enough of the Fulham support will love it, so by those criteria, maybe it is good?
This is a slightly unusual shirt… actually, I'll rephrase: it elicited a slightly unusual response from me, because when I first saw it I instinctively disliked it, partly because the shades of potpourri/grandma's tea cosy purple are not the sort of thing you expect to see on a football shirt. But then I kept looking at it and for no particular reason, it has grown on me, to the point where I actually really like it now. That sort of evolution in taste isn't unusual in itself, but there's nothing really here to grow. It's just a plain shirt with two different shades of purple on it. There are no designs you didn't appreciate the first time you saw it, no little details you missed initially …it's just a purple shirt. And yet it's quite good.
How would you describe this colour? The Wolves website doesn't but if you were to press me for a description, I'd say 'provincial leisure centre green', which isn't necessarily one you'd choose for your bathroom (unless you were a trainee lifeguard who's really attached to the job, I suppose), but one they have opted for here anyway. The initial reaction was to turn away and wrinkle the nose but the more I look at this, the more I don't mind it. It's probably the collar that does it: pleasingly neat and in a dark enough green that it offsets the main body, but still goes with it nicely.
It's faintly depressing for those of us with grey around the temples when clubs refer to "classic kits from our history", and it turns out they're talking about a time when the first of those greys started appearing. For example, the Bournemouth website reports that this simple but attractive blue and black striped shirt is "inspired by the club's classic kits from the club's history". We regret to inform any other grey-templed types that they last had a blue and black striped kit in 2012. Admittedly, it has popped up further back in their history (as long ago as 1990, as far as we can tell), but that 2012 shirt is enough to inspire some ennui. Anyway, nice shirt.
"It won't take fans long to see the influence of the club's early-'90s Adidas snowflake kit on this jersey," declares Adidas about this Manchester United away shirt. Erm… won't it? If you peer pretty closely at what looks to be a broadly white shirt, you will see a version of the classic old pattern, used on their 1990-92 away kit and more explicitly referenced in the 2021-22 version. But it's pretty abstract. The shirt itself is fine, although the faint bluey-purpley hue of the snowflake design does leave it with the old favourite 'dark socks left in the white wash' feel to it.
Sort of quite nice? I think? Supposedly, the wavy white patterns across the light blue are "sound waves of chants and singing recorded in our home sections" — the sort of thing a manufacturer would say, safe in the knowledge that nobody is actually going to check. Burnley's main sponsor this season is 96.com, one of these white-label betting sites that aren't actually available in the UK, so it can't be displayed on children's shirts. No problem, say the commercial team at Turf Moor: the junior version of this shirt is thus sponsored by Dude Perfect, which, if you're not familiar, is a troupe of whooping American YouTubers who do increasingly elaborate trick shots and sport-related stunts. A strange old state of affairs.
This shirt comes with its own marketing slogan, "In darkness, we dare", a reference to Tottenham Hotspur's club motto ("to dare is to do") — but it does sort of imply that the club itself is in darkness, and is trying to get out of it. Anyway, black/extremely dark and minimalist shirts are clearly a 'thing' this season and while this isn't quite the best of the bunch, it's pretty smart. A slightly bolder contrast colour would have improved it a bit, a more brilliant white, perhaps, as opposed to this grey-that-looks-slightly-purple-in-some-light option. I concentrate far too much on these kits' descriptions, but I have to tip my cap to whoever quickly retconned "a bold look to mark the return of Champions League away nights" into the spiel, given Spurs would have been slipping down the Premier League and nowhere near Europe's elite when the shirt was signed off.
After gleaning retro inspiration from the classic 'bruised banana' away shirt of the early 1990s, they've moved on a few years and brought out a kit that gives a nod to one from 1994, with the 'lightning bolt' motif referencing something to do with the Royal Arsenal Gatehouse in Woolwich, from where the earliest version of the club sprang. It's pretty nice, but one quibble would be that they already did a kit a few years ago that referenced the lightning bolt thing. The two shirts look different but it feels like a slight paucity of imagination.
Umbro have taken a 'back to basics' approach with West Ham's kits this year, which absolutely does not mean bad. Far from it. In this case it means 'quite good.' This shirt "takes inspiration: from the cream - or 'ecru', as only kit manufacturers or high-end paint companies call it - shirt that West Ham wore in 1996-97, and this is a rare case of the modern version actually being nicer than the retro shirt it is paying homage to. There's nothing to get particularly giddy about in this shirt, it's just clean, identifiably West Ham through the claret and blue trim, and will still look good in a few years when some of the more experimental designs will have aged rather badly.
The manufacturers' descriptions of football kits are often full of nonsense, contain flimsy post-hoc justifications for designs and feature impenetrable marketing speak, but they're not often passive-aggressive. However, the blurb on the Liverpool website tells us that the "off-white shade will be familiar to Reds who know their history", which is reminiscent of those people who see someone wearing a band t-shirt and say: "oh you like them, do you? Name their first three albums". Presumably this sniffy little aside is referring to their away kit from 1996-97…but of course, according to them, you won't need me to tell you that. Snarky online spiel aside, this is actually a really nice shirt, with the bold red contrasting the off-white main body really nicely, without overpowering the whole shirt. Now, name Liverpool's three top-scorers from 96-97.
Now this is black. Jet black. Coal black. Batman black. This shirt looks like it could be deployed by the US military and be undetectable by radar. We've had black kits before but this is…black. Apparently it references the earliest known Manchester City kit from the 1880s, when they were a church team known as St Mark's. Things sure have changed in…well, yes, 141 years, as you might expect, but even when a club has strayed as far from its roots as City and therefore such nods to its past feel slightly hollow, those nods can still be pleasing. "Timeless, minimalist and powerful," reads the blurb from Puma…and I'm pretty close to swallowing it whole.
Attempts to tie a shirt design to a club's locality or a beloved landmark can be pretty clumsy but even if they are, they can have a certain charm. Maybe I've been in a sentimental mood when writing about these kits this year, but it does feel like quite a few designers have got these things pretty spot on. Take this Sunderland shirt, which features, as its background pattern, a chessboard style arrangement with depictions of the Roker Lighthouse, which is a short distance away from the Stadium of Light and an even shorter distance from Sunderland's old ground, Roker Park. And it works: it works aesthetically and it works emotionally. Ideally, you wouldn't have an ugly betting company logo obscuring all of this, but within the confines of the grim capitalist nature of modern football, this is a delightful shirt.
You'll probably already know this but Leeds's signature all white kits weren't the norm until the mid-1960s, when Don Revie took inspiration from Real Madrid and switched their colours from the dark blue and yellow they had largely worn to that point. So this shirt is a nod to the old days, one they have made many times before, but it's always quite nice when clubs do this, so I'm minded to like this shirt regardless of how good it looks. And it does look pretty good, even if it is slightly…shiny, and those thin horizontal stripes do make it seem a bit like you're looking at the shirt through the door of a retro, art deco-themed restaurant toilet.
It might not be quite as nice as the home shirt, which is an absolute triumph, but this is absolutely terrific nonetheless. You don't get many pale yellow football shirts, almost the shade of a 1970s tennis top, but this has the bravery not to be needlessly brash, standing out by being different rather than grabbing you by the lapels and slapping you in the face. The detail on the cuffs is subtle (a nod to the railway tracks that once served the Liverpool docklands where their new stadium has been built) but sets off the rest of the shirt really nicely. Another win for Castore. Who saw this coming?
This might be the biggest disparity between the quality of one club's two shirts in a single season because while Chelsea's home is an absolute horror, only ranked at 20 because there are no places lower than that, this is not only absolutely gorgeous but provides a short history lesson too. This shirt apparently references one Chelsea had in 1974 that paid tribute to the 'Mighty Magyars', the great Hungarian team of the 1950s, a shirt that came about simply because then-manager Dave Sexton admired them so much. I never knew that and I'm delighted to know it now. Almost as delighted as I am by this shirt, which simultaneously manages to nod to the club's past but still looks original; plus be subtle and striking at the same time. It's wonderful.
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