While there are plenty of big issues to discuss before the Women’s World Cup gets underway — from injuries to intra-squad chaos to who’s going to win it — there is one thing everyone has been waiting for.
That’s right: the kits.
Are they good? Are they bad? Are they boring? Is boring good? Is avant-garde better? All these questions and more are answered here…
Argentina
Mariana Larroquette 🇦🇷 presents the Argentina kit for Women’s World Cup 2023 🏆 (Australia & New Zealand) pic.twitter.com/Hb31GfK7HO
— Football & Witball ⚽🎩🏵️ (@FootballWitball) January 24, 2023
This is going to be a running theme, so let’s get it out of the way early: is it bad/lazy when the women’s and the men’s kits are the same? Disrespectful, even? Should there be separate shirts for both? Or does having the same shirt suggest a connection and unity between the two teams? Genuinely not sure. Either way, this is a classic, clean design, maybe a little boring but we all have enough excitement in our lives, don’t we?
Rating: 7
Australia
Sam Kerr in new Australia home kit for Women’s World Cup. pic.twitter.com/vqRxgdN2nM
— CHELSEA WOMEN (@Chelseawomen_) April 5, 2023
When is what seems to be PR nonsense actually a sincere expression of a worthy sentiment? The lines are often blurred, so make what you will of Nike’s assertion that the marbling pattern on Australia’s kit illustrates their “diverse country and culture as well as the transformation of the national team over time”. Another view is the pattern looks like those bottles of sand in seaside souvenir shops. Your call as to which is a more appropriate description.
Rating: 6
Brazil
This is, undeniably, a Brazil shirt. Look: it’s yellow with a green trim. The shorts are blue. The socks are white. It’s got the CBF logo on it. It’s made by Nike. I’m vamping here because there’s not a huge amount to say about it. Nike claim there’s an “all-over bespoke fern pattern” that “represents the uniqueness of the team and its players”. But you really, really, really have to zoom in to see that pattern so… what’s the point? Anyway, it’s a Brazil shirt. Yellow with a green trim etc etc.
Rating: 6
Canada
🔴⚪️⚫️
The all-new 2023 @CANWNT kit from @nikefootball is available now.
Get yours before the early access window closes tomorrow! ⬇️
— Canada Soccer (@CanadaSoccerEN) April 10, 2023
According to Nike, this shirt “features an evolution of our iconic geometric maple leaf design”. Which may well be true, but it does also look like how they represented the ‘world wide web’ in early-mid 90s films when a young nerd in cool glasses ‘surfing the information superhighway’ found a ‘back door to the mainframe’ as a grizzled older colleague scoffs in the background. Or something like that.
Rating: 7
China
Never Before. Forever After.
The world’s biggest stage calls for revolutionary innovation. And that’s why we are debuting the next generation of Dri-FIT ADV on the world’s best footballers. Introducing the 2023 NikeNational Team Kits. 🏃♀️🏆⚽ #nikefc pic.twitter.com/j9miTvUBQK
— Nike Football (@nikefootball) April 3, 2023
The background patterns on these Nike shirts are all very well and look quite decent close up, but close up is not how most people experience football kits during football matches. From a distance, the pattern on this China shirt just looks like dark splotches and from a distance dark splotches just look like sweat patches. So isn’t this kit just going to make the Chinese players look sweatier than they actually are? Does that matter? Is it going to provide some weird psychological disadvantage where their opposition thinks they’re sweatier and thus more tired? Are we massively overthinking this? Hard to say at this stage.
Rating: 5
Colombia
📸 ¡𝙏𝙧𝙞𝙪𝙣𝙛𝙤 𝙙𝙚 𝙣𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙖 𝙎𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙘𝙞𝙤́𝙣!
Imágenes de la victoria 🆚 🇮🇶#TodosSomosColombia 🇨🇴 pic.twitter.com/r6aHIvc8uy
— Selección Colombia (@FCFSeleccionCol) June 18, 2023
Yeah, this is fine. The sort of hybrid v-neck/crew-neck collar works quite well and there’s a nice but sparing use of the red trim. Beyond that, it’s pretty Adidas template-y, which is not particularly interesting but ultimately not bad because the Adidas templates are not bad. Is it slightly the wrong shade of yellow for Colombia, though? Too bright? Or are we just looking for something to say again? Perfectly possible.
Rating: 7
Costa Rica
🇨🇷Esta es oficialmente Nuestra Segunda Piel.🤩
👕 Podés adquirirlas ya aca: https://t.co/jyCSuborEU#FCRF #ImpossibleIsNothing @adidasfootball pic.twitter.com/VKIQvu11KS
— FCRF 🇨🇷 (@fedefutbolcrc) February 1, 2023
Strong. May we please direct your attention to the collar of this shirt. Collars are important. They’re the thing that is most likely to cause irritation when you’re wearing a shirt, but they’re also one of the key places you can throw in a little detail if you don’t want to go nuts with the rest of the shirt. And Adidas have nailed this one: it’s quite basic, but to have a dark blue collar with a small white trim is a simple but inspired touch. The collar makes this shirt. The collar is a nine, the rest of the shirt is a 7, so it all averages out at…
Rating: 8
Denmark
A closer look at the @kvindelandsholdet new jersey 👕
The inspiration behind the design of the new jersey comes from pop art. With a World Cup upon the horizon, the 🇩🇰 women’s national team are ready to create their own bit of history and reach superhero levels on the pitch. pic.twitter.com/7Vy2zoZ7Mj— hummel (@hummel1923) April 3, 2023
Hmmm. It’s always tricky to have a go at a kit designer for trying something different, but this shirt looks like about six different kit designers trying something different. Apparently, the inspiration for the design is Pop Art, but it’s not entirely clear why. It’s less Andy Warhol, more an art student trying to create a collage, but then someone knocks the table and all the pieces end up everywhere. The collar is nice though.
Rating: 4
England
Nice Wembley debut for the new home kit 👌 pic.twitter.com/Y85dvdfvFQ
— Lionesses (@Lionesses) April 7, 2023
For a start, the shorts are blue, which all England home shorts should be from an aesthetic point of view, not forgetting the other reasons why it’s not sensible to have white shorts in women’s football. It’s the right blue, too, darker rather than the sky/lighter blue that has encroached on England kits in recent years. It’s a little bit ‘Nike retro template’, with the early-2000s detailing around the collar, but overall it’s decent.
Rating: 7
France
𝗨𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 pour porter haut les couleurs de la 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 🇫🇷
🎥 @alexipav
#FiersdetreBleues pic.twitter.com/NITqQXw4EQ— Equipe de France Féminine (@equipedefranceF) July 5, 2023
“It only takes a glance to know who this kit belongs to” states the Nike website about this France home shirt, but it takes much more than a glance. Many glances. A long hard stare, in fact. It looks nothing like a France kit. It’s completely the wrong blue! Far too light! Light blue shorts! What are you doing, Nike? If it only takes a glance to know it’s a France kit, why have they got the tricolour red, white and blue as a sleeve detail to tell you it’s a France kit? It’s like saying “this person needs no introduction”, before giving them a lengthy introduction. Non merci!
Rating: 4
Germany
📸 Say Cheeeeeeeese! 🙂
WIR #IMTEAM 🇩🇪
📸 DFB/Sofieke van Bilsen pic.twitter.com/ugX2ItRmNz— DFB-Frauen (@DFB_Frauen) July 3, 2023
Another copy of the men’s home kit, but it’s… OK, isn’t it? Nothing particularly special. It doesn’t look like a Germany kit though and no amount of watching them blunder their way out of another World Cup at the first hurdle, as the men did, will change that, but maybe the women will imbue it with less of a stench of failure. Adidas do get extra points for producing a plus-size version of this kit and most of their kits.
Rating: 7
[go–deeper id=”3663690″]
Haiti
Saeta is a brand unfamiliar to European audiences, which is broadly because they’re Colombian and seem to have kept most of their business in that region since the 1980s. Going by this design, they’re a sort of South American Macron, which regretfully is not a compliment. This shirt is OK, with the caveat that it feels like someone has designed it, then just kept adding little flicks of colour to it without much method until someone told them to stop, then they came back after hours and did it again.
Rating: 6
Ireland
A secret talent? @Katie_McCabe11 😂 #COYGIG pic.twitter.com/raSifKUC5v
— Ireland Football ⚽️🇮🇪 (@IrelandFootball) April 5, 2023
Castore are a slightly odd brand, seemingly coming from nowhere a few years ago to produce kit and sportswear for a surprising number of teams, while at the same time running a leisurewear brand that looks like it belongs beneath the padded gilets on guys named Hugo. This Ireland shirt is rather nice though, keeping the traditional green the dominant colour but using the other colours from the national flag for detail, with an excellent collar and subtle pinstripes. Hats off, Castore, and sorry about making fun of guys named Hugo/padded gilet wearers.
Rating: 8
Italy
Behind the scenes 🎬💙 @adidasfootball#Azzurre #LeAzzurreSiamoNoi #FIFAWWC pic.twitter.com/D6IxIuOrrb
— Italy ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@Azzurri_En) July 6, 2023
It feels like all objective consideration of the aesthetic merits of the Italy shirt should be abandoned on principle, on moral grounds. It’s been a sentiment repeated ad nauseam by people like us (by which I mean people who care enough to write about kits and people who care enough to read about them), but Italy in Adidas is simply wrong. It won’t do. It will not stand.
It doesn’t matter that the background pattern is both prominent enough to be noticeable but also unobtrusive, or that the terrific detail from armpit to hip takes in the three colours of the Italian flag, or that the gold trim around the collar and sleeves shouldn’t really work but actually does… oh god, it’s actually good, isn’t it? All principles go out of the window. Our morals are crumbling. Oh, evil temptation! Forbidden fruit, why are you so delicious?
Rating: 9
Jamaica
wah gwaan 😎🇯🇲
introducing the @jff_football 23/24 home, away, and pre-match jersey. available now: https://t.co/4I8whs0bZj pic.twitter.com/FB7BHE0eIm
— adidas Football (@adidasfootball) February 6, 2023
In theory, it should be quite difficult to mess up a Jamaica shirt. You’ve got the inherently cool/naturally prominent colour combination of yellow, green and black to work with, so that should be all you need. But this is oddly… boring? I can’t really put my finger on why this doesn’t work, but it just sort of looks like the away kit of an English Championship club that Adidas got the contract for by accident, so they just dashed something off from their big bag o’ templates and came up with this. It should work, but for some reason, it doesn’t.
Rating: 6
Japan
🔹✨第二部 配信中 ✨🔹
『なでしこジャパン 壮行会
–𝐁𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐁𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐄𝐋𝐅-』👥出演者👥
第二部：岩清水梓選手、阪口夢穂 さん、（MC）内田篤人さん、野村明弘さん📣内容📣
【第二部：18:50-19:30】
☑️ #なでしこジャパン がもっと好きになるファンゾーン… pic.twitter.com/Ec6ABlrDnc— JFAなでしこサッカー (@jfa_nadeshiko) July 6, 2023
Yes, now, this (on the right in the tweet above — for a better look, go to the Adidas page here) is really quite excellent. Sure, it looks a bit like a magic eye or what you would see on the screen when one of those computers from the 1980s goes a bit weird, but the patterns you can see are actually origami, tying it in a just-about-getting-away-with-it manner to the national culture. The away shirt is the real star of the show, but we’ll get to that later.
Rating: 8
Morocco
قميص جديد، تحدي جديد، هل أنتم مستعدون؟
🇲🇦 Morocco in #FIFAWWC 2023 : New jersey, new challenge, are you ready for more ? 🔥#DimaMaghrib #OneGameOneFamily #AtlasLionesses pic.twitter.com/oUJ7BQnT2O
— Équipe du Maroc (@EnMaroc) June 23, 2023
There’s a disappointing lack of marketing nonsense/design notes on the Puma website about this shirt, so it’s slightly unclear what the background patterns on it are all about. Which forces us to fill in the gaps ourselves, meaning the pattern looks a bit like… barbed wire? It absolutely isn’t that because that would be extremely weird, even from the fevered brains of football kit designers, but it’s tricky to work out what it actually is. So we’ll go with barbed wire until someone gets in touch.
Rating: 5
Netherlands
𝗪𝗜𝗡𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗘! 🚨
Claim de 𝗢𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗷𝗲 𝗕𝗲𝗮𝘁-𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 en maak kans op een gesigneerd shirt! 👕✍️
➠ https://t.co/QwnWdiSuc8
Heb jij de collectible al geclaimd? Dan ben je automatisch een kanshebber! 😏#TheOranjeBeat pic.twitter.com/eEk2snvqNB
— OranjeLeeuwinnen (@oranjevrouwen) July 8, 2023
They’ve gone with the same dominant pattern here that they tried to pull off with the France kit. But at least this does actually look like a shirt belonging to the nation in question, even if that pattern does resemble a large, two-month-old coffee stain on a corduroy shirt that refuses to be washed out by even the most persistent detergents. It’s not good, but it does make you wonder how a corduroy football jersey would work. Someone should try it.
Rating: 6
New Zealand
We’d like to introduce our #WhānauFerns to our new kits 🌿🖤🤍
Available to purchase 5 April
— New Zealand Football 🇳🇿 (@NZ_Football) April 3, 2023
Yeah, now, this is really good. Admittedly, there is a slight whiff of a school class where an exasperated teacher has given their pupils some of that black paper and a couple of white spray cans and left them to it while they go outside for a restorative cigarette. But if that is the case: give those kids a job as football shirt designers because there’s something about this one that just works. Black kits can be a gamble and tinkering with them even more so, but with this spray/stencil effect, they’ve managed to retain the inherent coolness of the black kit while also adding some variety and also incorporating the fern, the team’s logo. Good job all round.
Rating: 9
Nigeria
Eeesh, you aren’t going to get lost in this kit. Man alive that’s a bright green. Too bright, in fact, for both the retinas of anyone looking at it and Nigeria generally, who traditionally have been decked out in a slightly more subtle shade. Maybe the garish colour is to hide the fact this is just a bog-standard Nike template, with none of the individuality or personality that Nigeria kits have had in the past. So it somehow manages to be a bit much, but also simultaneously not quite enough.
Rating: 4
Norway
Ready for the world stage 🌎🇳🇴⁰⁰The new @nikefootball kits will be available 5. June 🌟 pic.twitter.com/Yy1TzG1kOJ
— Fotballandslaget (@nff_landslag) April 3, 2023
We once again come to our old friend, the ‘Is It Clean And Classic, Or Is It Dull?’ debate, which regular readers of these kit ratings from down the years might remember is a recurring theme. There are almost impressively few features on this Norway shirt, with absolutely nothing on about 90 per cent of it to distinguish it from anything else. It just about gets away with it because the colours combine quite well, but they’re literally the colours from the Norwegian flag which, according to no less a source than Wikipedia, was adopted in 1821. So Nike ain’t getting any credit for that.
Rating: 5
Panama
💪🏼¡Vamos con todo PANAMÁ!🇵🇦🔥
🇨🇴 x 🇵🇦
🗓️ 21-6-23.
🕖 7:30 pm.
🏟️ Pascual Guerrero – Cali, Colombia.#bfpanama🇵🇦 #todosytodassomospanama🇵🇦@fepafut pic.twitter.com/qIxQKpThLw— BARRAS FÚTBOL PANAMÁ🇵🇦 (@bfpanama) June 21, 2023
Reebok! Look at this! It’s the 1990s again! Given the prevalence of ’90s nostalgia that’s been around for the past few years, it feels quite fitting that Reebok are back at the top level again and with a pretty decent kit, too. The tessellating hexagons (you can get a closer look here) work quite nicely, even if they do look a bit like a bad carpet, although that piping under the armpits is simply too big. Still, welcome Reebok, here again from the ’90s. Maybe draw the line at a centre parting or Spice Girls cassette, though.
Rating: 7
Philippines
Ah, now, this is good and a bit unexpected. You might think that Adidas, when given a smaller nation’s kit to produce, would just try to fob them off with a boring template, but hats off to them, they have come up with something with just enough difference to make it interesting. It does have a bit of a ‘Colombia away shirt from some point in the early 2010s’ vibe to it, but the colours contrast nicely, the small touch of having the three stripes on the shoulder as red on a blue background works, too, and the pinstripes do the job of creating a small point of difference.
Rating: 8
Portugal
👕 Portugal have released their home and away kits for the women’s team ahead of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. pic.twitter.com/myTHzaRPu8 — Próxima Jornada (@ProximaJornada1) April 3, 2023
The writers of the design notes for this Portugal home shirt really had their work cut out. “Inspired by the intersection where history and modern culture collide, the Portugal 2023 home jersey takes a traditional colourway and infuses it with youthful energy,” says the Nike website. What? Because it’s just… well it’s just a red shirt with a bit of green on the collar and down the sides, isn’t it? And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s fine, it’s a plain but nice shirt. Let’s not over-intellectualise it, eh?
Rating: 5 (a point knocked off for the nonsense)
South Africa
A celebration of South African Football. Our past, present and future. #OurTimeNow #Lecoqsportifza #Lecoqsportif #safa #banyanabanyana #bafanabafana pic.twitter.com/ZeW182TwSt
— lecoqsportif za (@LeCoqSportif_SA) June 20, 2023
Let’s start off by saying: what a kit launch/unveiling video that is. They have almost screwed themselves over by making the video better than the kit, but the good news is that the kit is still excellent. Again, they have been given the basic tools of some superb colours to work with, but they have managed to strike the right balance with the background pattern of it being prominent enough to stand out but not so prominent that it makes the shirt look a) too busy and b) weird from a distance. The team might be in chaos, with running disputes against the federation, but at least they’ll look great while in that chaos.
Rating: 8
South Korea
Nike’s kits for this tournament have been something of a mixed bag: the ones where they have made a bit of an effort, which for the most part are great (the away shirts in particular), and the ones which are just their standard template and not a huge amount of imagination appears to have gone into them. South Korea seem to have got the rum end of that deal because both their shirts fall into the latter category, the home effort being red with pink trim. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they chose pink in an attempt to create a contrast, rather than lazier reasons, but even so, it doesn’t really work.
Rating: 5
Spain
𝑬𝒗𝒂 𝑵𝒂𝒗𝒂𝒓𝒓𝒐 𝒆𝒏 𝒎𝒐𝒅𝒐 𝒌𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒓 🤩
🇪🇸🆚🇵🇦 I 6-0 I 61’
📺 @teledeporte #JugarLucharYGanar pic.twitter.com/ECL33pm4IK
— Selección Española Femenina de Fútbol (@SEFutbolFem) June 29, 2023
As is the case with a lot of the teams at this World Cup, the away kits are where the real action is, but this Spain number is a perfectly fine retro number, recalling their jerseys from the late ’90s/early 2000s. The collar detail is particularly nice, contrasting the dark blue with the red and yellow of the Spanish flag. A small gripe though: those numbers on the front are too big. You need to be able to see them from 10 yards or so, not from space.
Rating: 7
Sweden
Sweden shirts of late have been, as a general rule, absolutely top-notch. Which makes this one slightly disappointing: there’s nothing really wrong with it and the collar and sleeve details are pretty strong, but there’s just something about it that screams ‘early 2000s generic Adidas training shirt that you’d find on the discount rack of your local sportswear shop’. Maybe it’s the team crest and the manufacturer’s logo being atop each other in the centre. Maybe it’s the slightly darker yellow stripes down the front. Maybe I’ve been doing this for too long and all the joy in my life has been sucked out of me.
Rating: 6
Switzerland
Puma have a tricky relationship with football kits. By which I mean they’re often rubbish. But in this case, even though it feels like there are a couple of competing ideas at play here, this one actually works. The pinstripes, interspersed with the small crosses of the Swiss flag, look great. And then the background pattern, which in the absence of any design notes presumably are meant to symbolise Swiss mountains, also just about work, although from a short distance, it might look like the players are bizarrely sweating from the hips up. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
Rating: 8
USA
Red, White, Blue… and Gold 🏆
The 23/24 @nikefootball #USWNT home kit 🇺🇸
Shop now » https://t.co/OzcTMutqpq pic.twitter.com/LBXOijogdg
— U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (@USWNT) April 3, 2023
Now, this USWNT home shirt is going to be a room-splitter. By which I mean plenty of people are going to view it as an abomination and perhaps even try to get the Supreme Court to ban it from as many states as possible. But I am here to tell all those people that they are wrong and this is in fact a brilliant shirt. According to Nike, it was inspired by the abstract expressionism art movement that started in New York in the 1940s, which “shifted the art epicentre from Europe to the U.S., similar to what the USA team has done for women’s soccer”.
Now, that does sound an awful lot like Americans taking credit for the popularity of football, with which I would like to take issue, but they have been the dominant force in the women’s game for three centuries, so maybe we’ll allow it. And in any case, the shirt is just really cool, so we can forget all the other stuff.
Rating: 9
Vietnam
🇻🇳 The Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) has officially announced the list of 23 players of the Vietnam Women’s team to attend the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023.
In the list of 6 players under the age of 23 and Huynh Nhu is the only player playing abroad.#VFF #FIFAWWC pic.twitter.com/zS6cgvRt94
— ASEAN FOOTBALL (@theaseanball) July 2, 2023
The Vietnam kit is made by a company called Grand Sport International, which absolutely sounds like the sort of name you would make up if you were put on the spot and told to invent a sportswear company. But it is a really terrific shirt, the subtle background pattern referencing the country’s national flag, the detailing around the collar and sleeves using the yellow from said flag well but sparingly. It’s another country who have the basic tools of a colour combination you can’t really go wrong with, but, as we’ve seen, plenty of kits have managed to mess that up. So, Grand Sport International — whoever you are and wherever you are — we salute you.
Rating: 8
Zambia
I can’t find the words to express how I feel, It can only be God.
Happy to be part of the team heading to the @FIFAWWC#ESK12 #EverChimwemwe #womwnsupportingwomen #WeareCopperQueens pic.twitter.com/Dq0lep7MUd
— Evarine Susan Katongo (@ESusanKatongo) July 3, 2023
Not sure what to make of this one. The colours look great, with the golden orange combining nicely with the deeper green, which differentiates it enough from teams with a similar scheme, like Australia or South Africa. But the diagonal strokes/chevrons that go down the left side of the shirt look like they had the plain shirt and someone said “we need something a bit more”, a designer shrugged and painted those on, then everyone high-fived and took the rest of the day off.
Which also doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just… not actively good, either.
Rating: 6
(Top photos: Carmen Mandato/USSF and Franck Fife/AFP, both via Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
