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The 10 worst 2026 World Cup kits includes Australia horror show

Anonymous
17 days ago
The 10 worst 2026 World Cup kits includes Australia horror show
Photo:/PA Images

The biggest ever World Cup means the biggest ever number of World Cup kits and therefore, logically, the biggest number of bad ones.

The World Cup is here, and it’s bigger and… well not better than ever. But definitely bigger. You can’t deny that.

Forty-eight teams means 96 kits. Plus goalkeepers. Plus a smattering of third kits here and there. It’s a lot of kits, is what we’re basically saying here.

We’re currently in the midst of ranking all 48 home shirts if that’s your bag, but here are the 10 biggest stinkers from across the World Cup’s full smorgasbord of what is in fairness mainly decent new kit.

 

10. Portugal home

It’s got wave patterns on it, to represent the sea. Okay.

But it doesn’t have much else, and what could have been a really decent collar has been lost due to the lack of commitment and, dare we say it, thought. There’s actually a really nice shape to it with the slight elongation at the point.

That detail is totally lost, however, by being in the same dark red as the shirt itself with the green of the collar just a narrow and standard V. Just swapping the two colours around on the collar and cuffs to make them predominantly green with a red inlay would have been a huge improvement and made by far the most interesting thing about this kit more of a standout feature.

And let’s not pretend you can just go around making ‘wavy shape to represent sea’ the big or indeed as it’s turned out here only feature of a major nation’s World Cup kit in big 2026 when little old Bournemouth have been pulling that stunt for years and years now.

 

9. Tunisia third

Harsh to include a third kit, really, when plenty of teams don’t even bother with one, but we just don’t really understand what Kappa’s thought process was here.

Especially as the home and away kits are lovely and clearly complementary things. Away kits don’t always have to be locked in step with the home kit. (Some do; Croatia’s away kit, for instance, should always be exactly the same as the home kit but in two-tone blue).

But when you have such a clear coherence between the design of the home and away kits as is the case here, with the white home and red away both having the feather print on the sleeves for the Eagles of Carthage, we don’t understand why you then just throw in a random third kit that has nothing to do with that.

The neat and tidy collars of the first two kits is replaced here by a needlessly fussy one that for some reason says ‘rugby league’ to us rather than football.

Beyond all that, though, there’s the main issue with the logos. What on earth are the Kappa Omini logo and the Tunisia crest doing all the way up there right under the armpit?

 

8. USA home

Nike have another strong collection at this World Cup but also some early stinkers. This one? Not for me, Clive.

Might very well just be our own instinctive gut reaction to US flag-shagging but we simply don’t want or need a whole kit in solemn yet garish tribute to a phenomenon that repulses and endangers us all at this time.

There are clear nods here to the 1994 kit, which makes perfect sense given that was the last time the USA hosted the tournament, but there was less general busyness to that kit with its wavy vertical lines more consistent than the horizontal ones here. It was also just more subtle and less overt in its in-your-face representation. Both kits do seem to rather speak of their time.

The design of this kit also falls down the moment you have to stick a number on the front of it and even more so on the back. And, while it’s not quite clear in the pictures, the white stripes are actually an off-white that give the whole thing a slightly grubby look that, given what it’s very obviously based on, is a bit on the nose and probably not really what was intended.

If you’re wondering where the stars are to go with the stripes, that would be the away kit. It’s just flag-shagging all the way down.

 

7. Bosnia away

Kelme have stuck with the pattern that on the home kit gives Bosnia something of a bus-seat upholstery look but which on this white away kit somehow – can’t fully explain why or how – takes this far away from football-shirt territory.

In white and blue rather than just blue, this suddenly becomes generic sportswear rather than even generic teamwear. You could easily imagine a long-haired South American clay-court-specialist tennis player causing a minor kerfuffle with this top at Wimbledon, scandalising the members by trying to get away with those blue sleeves on their way to a half-arsed four-set defeat to a British serve-and-volley wildcard ranked 173 places below them out on Court 18.

Above all, it just looks precisely like something you’d get at a multi-sport competition that isn’t the Olympics. It’s something you might see all the racket-sports lads donning at a Commonwealth Games. This, in the end, is a football shirt that screams table tennis. Now there’s nothing wrong with table tennis, but this is the World Cup, guys. Come on.

And to make matters worse, they’ll be wearing their white away kit in two of their three group games.

 

6. Austria home

Puma have stunk out recent tournaments kit-wise, and this is another honker. There are some genuinely decent – certainly by their standards – Puma ones this year so don’t think we’re having a go at them for no reason. But this is just very boring indeed.

Later on we’ll have a go at them for doing unnecessarily fussy and complicated collars, so let our complaints about this rather baggy shapeless nothing of a round crew collar be your latest warning that we are irredeemably fickle and impossible-to-please.

Puma themselves being so pleased with so many of their kits this year that they’ve put the cat on them three times is also very hubristic for a Big Three manufacturer with such a shocking record across recent tournaments.

 

5. Netherlands home

No. No, no, no. One of the very weakest of all the Nike efforts at this tournament, and that’s a disgrace when you consider the in-built advantages offered by the Netherlands’ colour palette.

We’re struggling to fully put our finger on precisely what’s the matter with it, but basically the orange is wrong. It’s not like it’s a dull orange. It’s not that. It’s still bright. But it’s not the right kind of bright.

Yes, we are really struggling here, we know. It’s like neon highlighter bright instead of just… orange bright. There’s something fake about that orange and we swear we aren’t going mad.

There’s also the classic ‘centred crest but right-aligned maker’s mark’ error here, which is always just unforgivable from any manufacturer – especially one that clearly knows and understands the golden rule that centring one of the two logos means the other must join it, because they’ve got it right on other kits.

There’s also an iridescent effect on the badges, and we rarely care for iridescent effects on badges. If you absolutely must do it, it feels far more like away or third-kit behaviour. Have some respect on the home kit.

 

4. Norway away and third

We just don’t like whiteout/blackout kits. It’s always ‘Ooh, look at us, aren’t we edgy making the whole kit the same colour, right down to the badges and logos?’ No, you’re not. It’s not edgy, it’s f*cking lazy.

It’s like, how much more black could this kit be and the answer is none. None… more black. But what you have to remember about Spinal Tap is that they are meant to be ridiculous caricatures in a mockumentary. You’re not actually supposed to do any of the stuff they do. And even in that universe, David St Hubbins saw through the plain black cover for Smell The Glove and spotted it for the lazy gimmick that it was. And that was over 40 years ago.

The third kit is exactly the same as this one, but in white. We can’t even be arsed to go and find a picture of it. If you can’t conjure it up in your imagination based on the information we’ve provided, then we’re not sure we can help you further.

Main point: enough with these kits now, at least for anything other than specific one-off occasions. As an actual main-issue kit? Utter lazy hack woke nonsense.

 

3. Uruguay home

Quite simply the least football shirt football shirt that will be on display in North America this summer and that is the biggest shirt crime going.

It’s also boring, and that might well be the second biggest shirt crime going. The shirt suffers massively from just having not one single standout detail of which to speak. The colour is wishy-washy, and none of the trim detail does anything to grab one by the bollards.

We also just really don’t care for buttons on football shirts. This, we accept, is a massively subjective and arbitrary thing to not like and it’s very much our issue to work through. But it’s also our list, so it is going to come into consideration when necessary. We don’t mind a full collar on a football shirt at all, but would always rather see it deployed over a lovely classic ‘this is a football shirt, lads’ crossover v-neck rather than a meek little button-up placket.

This looks like something the Cambridge Boat Race crew would wear for the trophy presentation after clinching their latest victory on the Thames before amusingly chucking the little shouty mascot fella in the manky river because he’d been yelling at them for the last 15 minutes.

We don’t really understand the Boat Race, and we don’t really understand this kit.

Should also be noted that, as is so often the case when confronted with a bland home kit, the away kit goes incredibly hard. So hard, in fact, that we can even get past our initial eye-twitch response to a team with a blue home kit having a (much, much darker, sure) blue away kit.

 

2. Czech Republic home

Puma’s recent record with major tournament kits is… not good. And this is not a good kit. We make no apologies for being fussy and subjective judges of kits, our mood swinging from day to day and moment to moment. One minute we’re demanding clean and simple designs, the next we want bolder and braver choices.

It’s the kit equivalent of the never-to-be-solved consistency/common sense dichotomy in referee decision-making.

But what we cannot and never will accept is a shirt that manages to both bore us with its blandness as this red effort does but then also irritate us with its fussiness. It’s got everything wrong. We actively despise that collar, which is in fact at least two collars fighting for attention that neither of them merit, and aren’t raving about the detailing on the sleeve cuffs either.

And another button that has even less business being on that collar than the Uruguay one, and which has the added effect here of making everyone wearing it look like they’re wearing a clip-on microphone.

 

1. Australia away

In general, we consider ourselves harsher judges of shirts that do too little than shirts that do too much.

A disappointing boring shirt is almost always worse than a disappointing wacky one.

But where we really lose our patience is with shirts that are ostentatiously aiming to stand out but then… don’t. And that’s precisely what Australia’s away shirt is doing here. It’s screaming ‘LOOK AT ME’ but when you actually do, you quickly realise that beyond some loud colours there really isn’t actually anything here. No bold print, no interesting design choices that do or don’t pay off. Just an early 20s gradient colour fade that happens to be between two vaguely unexpected colours.

Those two colours are officially ‘Bright Spruce’ and ‘Orange Pulse’ if you’re interested. We’re not interested, because this shirt, despite its desperation to be so, is not interesting.

In fact, it’s failed so hard in its transparent attempt to be interesting that it’s ended up looking less like a matchday shirt and more like a warm-up top. How embarrassing.

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The 10 worst 2026 World Cup kits includes Australia horro...