We've Officially Reached Peak Football Kit
The shirts you’d only ever see on a match day, the ones worn by players and thousands of supporters, are no longer just for 3pm on a Saturday.
From local handlebar-moustached baristas and beanie-wearing barbers to the swarms of celebrities who don’t know their Lionel Messi from their Cristiano Ronaldo, everyone — and I mean everyone — is wearing football shirts.
Let me be frank: jerseys are the best they’ve been in a long time.
You can forget the 1990s and the early 2000s, two eras often referred to as a golden era for jerseys (think Germany's Rudi Völler at Italia '90, or Patrick Viera in that golden Arsenal kit) because today's ultra-techy, nostalgia-infused kits have peaked.
They not only blend the best of both worlds: the stylish notes of yesteryear and the innovation and materials of today.
Of course, jerseys away from the pitch isn't an entirely new thing. Nigeria's green kit was a huge hit across the globe when it came out prior to the 2018 FIFA World Cup and ended up selling out several times over.
There's clearly an increased demand for these kits, too. Most recently, after it was revealed that Nike wouldn't be selling replicas of England goalkeeper Mary Earps' goalkeeper kit from the Women's World Cup because it "is not part of Nike's commercial strategy" a petition has since been started a received over 75,000 signatures.
For years people have been wearing vintage kits on the daily, and that’s even before mentioning the rise of “Blokecore," a trend coined by TikTokers to describe a look comprising a vintage football jersey, jeans, and sneakers.
But now, the lines between football and fashion are non-existent and kit manufacturers and designers have broken free of regurgitating lazy templates (from 2013 to 2018 England's Nike jerseys were almost identical) and focused on more stylish and wearable designs. Kits that look as good on the pitch as they do with a pair of jeans, or some shorts and sneakers.
Take the kits adidas designed for Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, and Arsenal for the 2023/24 season which all sport stripped back looks with paraphernalia kept a minimum. Or Nike’s sponsor-less Chelsea home jersey, a design dubbed “a 90's thing” by the club because of its minimal look.
Even when today's jerseys aren’t subtle, they’re still good to look at. Manchester United’s green and white-striped away number, for instance, is based off of an early nineties design from the club’s archive that still looks strikingly contemporary. The same goes with Ajax’s patterned away strip, a shirt that deserves more than just a 90-minute outing once a week.
Finally after years of lagging behind football’s fashion trendsetters Venezia FC and Athens Kallithea F.C. (two club’s renowned as the sport’s most aesthetically trendy), Europe’s so-called “big clubs” are beginning to churn out kits worthy of being worn both on and off the pitch.
Still, as nice as it is to get more wearable jerseys, their price points have gone up – Tottenham’s home jersey is the Premier League’s most expensive at $135, a 12-percent rise from last season. But then again, if we're getting more bang for our buck, what more can we ask for?
