2026 World Cup Kit Rankings Part One: 48-37 including USA & Argentina… | OneFootball

The World Cup now gets underway quite literally this month and that means it’s officially time to bury those nagging voices about all sorts of concerns way, way down and try to enjoy it.

Don’t let the bastards get you down. Sure, they keep giving the tournament to unsavoury countries, sure they’ve tried to ensure that by the end of the group stage you feel as sick and ashamed of yourself as after the third chocolate egg of Easter morning. And yes, they’ve finally caved and let the USA have matches played in quarters.

But it’s still the World Cup, it still only comes along once every four years, and it’s still a magnificent thing that belongs to us and not them and we must never let them ruin it completely, however hard they try.

As well as a feast of football, the World Cup is also a feast of football fashion. And here at least we can enjoy the otherwise questionable expansion of the tournament. Because more teams means more kits and we love football kits. Even the ones we hate. Especially the ones we hate.

Because there are now 48 teams, we’ve had to divide our comprehensive and definitive ranking of every single home kit on display in North America this summer into more manageable chunks.

Just to show how much we’re getting into the spirit of things, we’ve gone for quarters.

Starting as any self-respecting countdown must from the bottom, here are numbers 48 to 37. Some big names in here already.

48. Uruguay

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 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.

47. Czech Republic

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.

46. Austria

There are some genuinely decent – certainly by their standards – Puma ones coming later so don’t think we’re having a go at them for no reason. But this is just very boring indeed.

We’re aware we’ve just had a go at them for an unnecessarily fussy collar, so let our complaints about this rather baggy shapeless nothing of a round crew collar be your first warning that we are fickle and impossible-to-please judges.

Puma being so pleased with all their kits this year that they’ve put the cat on them three times is also very hubristic at this stage of the rankings.

45. Netherlands

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 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 two logos means the other must join it in the middle for obvious reasons of balance, because they’ve got it right on some other kits.

Throw in the iridescent effect on the badges, and you’ve got a mess. We really don’t care for iridescent badges one bit. If you absolutely must do it, it feels far more like away or third-kit behaviour. Have some respect on the home kit.

44. Jordan

We do want to be careful throughout these rankings, because we’re aware there are huge differences in what can reasonably be expected. There’s a clear Big Three in the football kit world, and especially at international level.

Adidas, Nike and Puma are, give or take, responsible for around a quarter of the kits at this tournament each, with around one quarter left for everyone else. So when we get to kits by the likes of your Kelmes, your Kappas, your Marathons and even the former giants like the Umbros and Reeboks of this world, we will generally be inclined towards generosity.

But we just don’t really like this Kelme effort. The collar is a swing and a miss, and the whole thing looks less like a major tournament football kit and more like something you’d see England’s table-tennisers, badmintonistas and squash artists wearing at a Commonwealth Games.

43. USA

Nike have a 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.

42. Portugal

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 boosted this several places up the rankings by making by far the most interesting thing about this kit more of a standout feature.

You can’t be making ‘waves to represent sea’ the big feature of a kit in big 2026 when Bournemouth have been pulling that stunt for years now.

Some credit to Puma for at least restricting themselves to one cat logo on this one, mind.

41. Argentina

A disappointing effort for the defending champions and the lowest ranked of all the adidas kits at this tournament. That’s surprised us, because to be honest we’re furious with adidas about every single one of their home kits at this tournament.

Why? Because they’ve completely butchered the stripes and we have not one clue why. There are few more iconic sights in all of sportswear than the adidas three stripes. They are literally the brand with the three stripes.

And we all know what those stripes look like don’t we? It’s not hard. It’s three stripes, of equal width, with an equal gap between each stripe. Get that right and you can then do anything you want with them. They don’t all have to be the same colour – indeed, they are often at their most striking when not all the same colour. A flag-bases tricolour, for instance, can often be a wonderful touch. You can even trim the stripes with a border and it still works.

But what you can’t do is make the stripes oversized and fat with a tiny little gap in between them. That should be obvious to absolutely anyone with eyes. Yet this is, and we’re genuinely shaking as we type this, precisely what adidas have done.

To every single one of their home kits for this tournament, and for next season. The only slight consolation is that the need to leave space for sleeve patches restricts this abomination to the shoulders on the short-sleeved version, but if you’re the sort of dandy who like to saunter around town in a long-sleeved football shirt (i.e. very much our sort of dandy) then every single adidas home shirt for this tournament is a complete write-off for you.

Sorry for the long rant, but at least it’s out of the way and won’t need repeating for every subsequent adidas kit in the list (SPOILER: It will be repeated for every subsequent adidas kit in the list).

It points to the strength of adidas’ general design work that they don’t dominate the lower reaches of the list having offended us so. The tragedy in many ways is that so many of their kits would be instant classics if they’d just left the stripes damn well alone.

But this would not be a classic. This is not good just in general. Adidas have seemingly decided to go in for a penny, in for a pound here and just muck up all the stripes.

Argentina’s blue and white stripes are, to our mind, the international equivalent of Newcastle’s black and white. Just don’t mess with them. Adidas have spent the last 12 months messing with them.

Stop messing with stripes, adidas. Your own and everyone else’s. Argentina’s blue stripes should just be… light blue. Not lots of different blues shouting over the top of each other. Just simply no need for it.

Again, we must add the already seemingly obligatory ‘away kit slaps, though’ caveat for those down the arse end of this list.

40. Algeria

The Argentina kit is the only adidas kit where we fundamentally dislike the overall design. Where the rest of them will turn up in these rankings is based largely on how off-putting those monstrous stripes are. In general, that means the more low-key the kit, the lower the ranking will be.

It’s a shame, because we don’t mind a low-key and subtle kit and in another, less ridiculous world, this would be a solid mid-table effort from Algeria. But with only some very minor detailing on the shirt itself, there’s just no escape from those stripes.

And we think we’ve already made our thoughts pretty clear on that score.

39. Sweden

A very average adidas kit to begin with, but by making the ruined oversized stripes white rather than yellow and thus giving them an accent colour all of their own they’ve managed to draw even more attention to them here than on any of the other kits.

Just to be crystal f*cking clear: that is not a good thing.

Again, though: an absolute banger of a trefoil, proper-striped away kit. There’s a theme, isn’t there?

38. Bosnia

Someone always rocks up at a major tournament resembling a National Express coach seat, and this year Bosnia have drawn that particular sh*tty straw.

As already noted, we do try not to be too critical of the smaller manufacturers who have to go up against the Big Three at these events, but Kelme have come up with a very meh effort here that loses even more points for clearly trying and failing to be striking.

37. Switzerland

You can always rely on Switzerland. They will turn up at every major tournament. Xherdan Shaqiri will score an absurd worldie somewhere along the way. They will lose in the last 16. They will be wearing the same Puma kit they always wear.

We challenge you to tell us what is different about this kit to the one they wore at Euro 2024 or Qatar 2022. That’s right, you can’t. Same kit every single time. And it’s not even a good one. An entirely and instantly forgettable one.

And don’t come at us with this ‘glow in the dark’ nonsense. Really useful feature that, on a football shirt. A desperate last resort of a measure because they know they’ve just done the same shirt again. “Oh, what if it glowed in the dark? That’s different!” Behave yourselves.