A new season and new threads to enjoy — unless, of course, your team already wore their 2025-26 home kit last season for marketing purposes.
As ever, the beginning of a campaign means new strips for all 20 Premier League clubs and that has stirred The Athletic’s resident kit critic Nick Miller into action. He has cast his eye over every fresh home shirt that we’ll see when English football’s top flight gets back underway next week and has rated them from worst to best.
Dive into the list below.
Getty Images
This placed 32 out of 32 in our Club World Cup kit rankings, and not much has changed my opinion since. 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 design. Essentially, this looks like a very unofficial Chelsea shirt, designed by someone who knows two things: that Chelsea play in blue, and they play in London, so have produced something that you might expect to see on a roadside stall somewhere, alongside a clothing 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 and a picture of the Queen on it.
Getty Images
Brentford FC
Brentford have switched from Umbro to Joma as their kit manufacturer this season, their fifth in the Premier League, so they’re very much part of the furniture now. But this shirt has a significant ‘Championship/League One yoyo club’ feel to it, the sort of thing that Brentford might have worn…well, when they were a Championship/League One club. Maybe this is a prediction in kit form, a comment on the turbulent times that Brentford are going through, a suggestion that they will actually be in the Championship/League One soon. Obviously this isn’t true, football kits take years to design and produce, but there is just something about this that doesn’t feel quite right. Sorry Brentford, sorry Joma.
Brentford FC
Getty Images
West Ham are among a few teams who have called their own home kit a “modern classic in the making”, which doesn’t feel like the sort of thing you can declare about your own gear. We’ll be judges of that, thank you. They also report that this shirt is “stripped back to create a clean, minimalist look for the new season”, which is very true and without context, looks pretty nice. But where’s the blue for the claret and blues? It’s relegated to the collar and cuffs and a little triangle underneath the armpits. It’s not the first time that they’ve pulled this stunt, but it just doesn’t feel like a West Ham shirt.
Getty Images
Getty Images
The general Adidas theme this year is a mid-2000s retro nod, with the curved piping down from the armpit to the hip referencing kits from circa the 2006 World Cup. Takes you back, doesn’t it: Jose, Frank and JT are all together for Chelsea again, electro clash bands are riding high in the hit parade and everyone is strutting around in low-rise jeans. Which is fine, but on this Villa kit it feels like an element too many: with the retro piping, the Adidas stripes on the shoulders, the detail on the cuffs (referencing the Villa Park facade) and the background pattern on the main body of the shirt, it’s just all a bit too…busy.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Crystal Palace are selling this season’s home shirt in both standard and ‘body’ fit, the latter being the skin-tight fit that the actual professional athletes wear. If you’re not a professional athlete and feel confident enough in your physique to go for the body fit, and aren’t nervous about every undulation in your stomach and every slice of pizza you’ve eaten to essentially be on display, then fair play to you. For the rest of us, the standard fit will do nicely. It’s a fairly straightforward design and the white pinstripes between the thicker main stripes break things up a bit, but what’s going on with the thick white stripes on each sleeve? Why? It just looks a bit distracting, like wearing a neon bucket hat with a suit: everyone’s eyes are going to be drawn to that, rather than the rest of the pretty good shirt.
Getty Images
Brighton & Hove Albion FC
Pretty route one stuff here from Brighton and Nike. Blue and white stripes. No other colours. No real trim. Bit of a white collar. White cuffs. Done. Bosh. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: sometimes, simple and route one is good. The only real gripe I would have is that the band across the middle of the shirt, housing the sponsor’s logo, seems to get bigger and bigger every year. American Express started sponsoring Brighton in 2013, and they’ve always had an accommodation for their branding, but if you look at the evolution of their shirt over the years it has grown, to the point now where it looks a lot like the shirt is actually built around it. Got to pay the piper and all that, but it feels very ostentatious.
Photo:
Brighton & Hove Albion FC
Brighton & Hove Albion FC
Getty Images
There are a few staples of your classic seaside gift shop: lewd postcards, T-shirts with slogans aimed at stag dos, mountains of the local sweet ‘delicacy’…and those weird little bottles with multicoloured sand, arranged in a theoretically whimsical and enchanting fashion. It’s always slightly unclear what you’re supposed to do with them, but Umbro have clearly found a purpose: the inspiration for Bournemouth’s new home shirt. This is your classic red and black stripes, but with a ‘rippled sand’ pattern on the red bits…because Bournemouth is on the coast! It’s by the seaside! Where sand is! It’s good stuff. Actually, the pattern looks a bit more like the streaks on a car windscreen that just won’t be shifted, but I guess you have to do something if you want to be a bit different with stripes.
Getty Images
Getty Images
It’s great when a kit is inspired by something particular to the club, a detail that adds a little something individual to the shirt and thus isn’t just a cookie-cutter design. But is that negated a bit if you have to read the sales notes of the shirt to understand what it is? When you’re told that the squiggly lines on this Burnley shirt are a reference to the topography of the hilly area around Turf Moor, it makes perfect sense. But if you don’t read that, it looks like someone at Castore left the shirt with their two-year-old child and a box of crayons. Which isn’t to say it’s necessarily bad. Points awarded for a little thought and imagination, at least.
Getty Images
Getty Images
There’s something about Fulham which conveys reliability, predictability, comfort even. They’ll finish somewhere between ninth and 13th. They’ll sometimes play some nice football. They’ll be a home for some nice young players who weren’t quite good enough for the biggest clubs. So maybe it’s appropriate that they have one of the more basic kits you’re likely to see. It’s fine isn’t it, nothing really to complain about, nice and clean…but from any further away than a couple of yards, it’s just a white shirt with some black bits on it. Peer a little closer and you’ll see a quite nice pattern that references the wrought iron on the gates of Craven Cottage, but beyond that the only notable thing is that they seem to be wearing white rather than black shorts this season, which will look quite weird for a while.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Often, the fuzzy edges that sometimes end up on the stripes of shirts can get quite annoying, but you assume that designers are just doing it to add something slightly different to a set format. Apparently not in this case. This is from the blurb on the Adidas website: “The time-honoured shepherd’s check pattern added to the edges of the stripes on this Newcastle United FC jersey create blurred transitions that really catch the eye”. So yeah…inspired by…shepherds. We’re assuming this isn’t a tribute to Freddie Shepherd, the former Newcastle chairman who was viewed as reasonably unpleasant in the 1990s. But still…shepherds.
Getty Images
Getty Images
We reviewed this shirt before the Club World Cup, and with the benefit of seeing it in action, it does look 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 – 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-decorator. It’s also exactly the right shade of blue for City, which is crucial.
Getty Images
Getty Images
There are two types of people in this world: those that think the trim on Manchester United’s home shirts should be predominantly white, and those that think it should be predominantly black. The latter group holds sway this year, but there’s enough of a nod to the former to keep them interested, at least, with some white amongst the black on the collar and cuffs. According to the Adidas blurb, this shirt “pays tribute’” to United’s home, with some “abstract Old Trafford-inspired graphics on the sleeves”. Now, abstract can mean many things, but in this case it appears they mean: “you basically can’t tell what they’re supposed to represent so you can just say they relate to whatever you like”. If you want a proper Old Trafford graphic on a shirt, spend hundreds on a retro 1994 edition instead.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Real retro vibes to this Wolves shirt, both in a macro and a micro sense. Pull back, view it from a bit of a distance and it could look like a recreation of a shirt from the 1970s, worn by someone with a big bubble perm and a nice thick moustache. But go in close, and it has a variety of background designs on the main body of the shirt that reference assorted elements of the club’s past, including a version of what the club’s badge used to look like back in the 1970s. All of which gets a big thumbs up here: it might be manufactured by Sudu, which are essentially an in-house company backed by Wolves owners Fosun, but they’ve nailed it here.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Nottingham Forest announced their new home shirt on the same day that it emerged Morgan Gibbs-White was heading to Tottenham, which turned out not to happen, but was not ideal timing, particularly as this shirt references the 1992-93 version, when Forest also sold their best attacker to Tottenham (Teddy Sheringham), and subsequently got relegated. Still, that’s all behind them now, and this is a pretty nice shirt, continuing Adidas’ continuing love affair with the pinstripes this year along with some good, simple trims. There are gripes – it probably would’ve looked cleaner without the secondary pinstripes, the shield around the Forest crest makes it look a bit ‘Pro Evo 2004’ – but overall: strong.
Getty Images
Getty Images
In the years since Arsenal returned to the warm embrace of Adidas in 2019, they have mucked around with the iconic three stripes on the sleeve quite a bit: they’ve had blue, a slightly darker blue, white, gold and sometimes no stripes at all. But the classics never go out of style, and in this case the classics are the combination of white sleeves and red stripes. It just works, doesn’t it? It fits. It feels like an Arsenal kit. There’s a bit of variation here with the repeated background pattern of the stylised Arsenal ‘A’, but otherwise it’s back to basics here. And that’s alright by us.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Very good. You could gripe about the size of the sponsor’s logo, and you wouldn’t really be wrong: you can see that thing from space, and both the Nike swoosh and the Spurs badge look like they’ve been squeezed in above it. Also, anyone who has lived in a bad rented house might recognise the background pattern, which is reminiscent of the awful ceilings you sometimes get in the bathrooms of those places, the sort of material whose only real purpose seems to be as a vector for mould. But if you ignore those things, this is a really nice shirt, the broadly plain white front of the shirt framed by the dark blue bands from the shoulders and into the armpits. It’s a new era for Tottenham Hotspur, and they’re going to look right smart in it.
Getty Images
Getty Images
There are arguably more important things in life than who makes a particular football club’s football kit. But there are some team-manufacturer duos that just seem to make the world a more ordered place. Denmark and Hummel. Brazil and Nike. And then there’s Liverpool and Adidas. They’ve been apart for 13 years, with Nike, New Balance and Warrior (?!?!??!?) sharing duties in the intervening years. But they’re back together now, and it’s delightful, this shirt giving a healthy nod to the ones they wore circa 2007 – think Fernando Torres, Xabi Alonso, Dirk Kuyt…Andriy Voronin. They announced this with an Alice In Wonderland themed video for some reason, but eccentric marketing choices aside, it’s the winningest of winners.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Sometimes you have urges that make you feel slightly ashamed of yourself. The guilty pleasure. The sort of thing that you’re instinctively drawn to, but then your logical brain kicks in and you stop and check yourself. A relatively minor one of mine is that the Red Bull logo actually looks pretty good on – nay, perhaps even enhances – any kit it’s on. It’s a tricky feeling, for someone who a) thinks Red Bull the drink is disgusting and b) is philosophically opposed to the multi-club model they essentially pioneered, but the heart wants what it wants. And in this case the heart wants a delightfully simple Leeds shirt, with tremendous detail around the collar and cuffs (which references the tunnel many Leeds fans walk through to reach Elland Road, apparently), and is…regrettably…finished off quite nicely by those two rutting bulls. Listen, nobody is perfect.
Getty Images
Getty Images
There are many reasons to welcome the return of Sunderland to the Premier League, but one of them is the presence of Hummel in the top flight, and as ever it has delivered here. If you’re nit-picking, there’s probably a touch too much black on the shirt (which isn’t bad, it just makes them look a bit Brentford-y or Sheffield United-y), but otherwise this is a special thing. It’s quite ‘retro 1980s’ in an era where retro now means the mid 2000s, which is quite comforting for those of us of slightly more advanced years. The pattern on the white stripes is apparently inspired by the Wear Footbridge near the Stadium of Light, but what really matters is that this looks sensational. Welcome back.
Getty Images
Getty Images
This is absolutely exceptional. The wavy lines are a reference to the River Mersey, on the banks of which Everton will be playing this season at…sorry, it’s been a couple of months and it still sounds utterly ridiculous…the Hill Dickinson Stadium. They look tremendous, and while it might not be a deliberate tribute to Everton’s kits of their real glory days in the mid/late-eighties, this shirt does remind you of that a little bit. Kit appreciators of a certain mindset went into deep mourning when Everton went from Hummel to Castore, a brand that reeks of rugby, but if they’re going to produce shirts that look like this all the time, then sign me up for a day at Twickers drinking pints with Hugo and Jonty.
Getty Images
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
Aug 9, 2025
Connections: Sports Edition
Spot the pattern. Connect the terms
Find the hidden link between sports terms
Play today’s puzzle