The 10 worst kits of 26-27: Leeds, Real Madrid, Villa, Spurs… but a clear and obvious ‘winner’ | OneFootball

We absolutely love a kit ranking here so we’ve cast the net wide and come up with the 10 worst of the 26/27 season.

And we’ve behaved ourselves, too: while we could, obviously and correctly, have just plucked any 10 Adidas home kits with the horrible wrong stripes on them, we have resisted the temptation and included some other honkers along the way.

There are still a lot of the Adidas stripes, though. We couldn’t let them off the hook altogether. Especially when in some cases the broken Adidas stripes aren’t even the worst stripes on the kit. You know who we’re talking about. But they’re not even the only ones…

10. Aston Villa home

Fat Adidas stripes instantly make an appearance in our top 10 on a kit that also hampered by the wrong colour scheme and a nasty looking collar. Quite an impressive effort, really, to attempt a clean, classy top and end up with something that offends almost everywhere you look.

We know it’s not unprecedented for Aston Villa to have claret rather than blue sleeves but the point is that the fact something has been done wrong a few times before isn’t an excuse to do it wrong again. Aston Villa’s kit should be claret AND blue. Not claret WITH blue.

Even with all the other details on the shirt being blue, the balance is wrong. It also – and we could admittedly be proved wrong about this once we get real-life exposure to the kit – looks like the claret is quite a dark claret. There are subtle differences among the claret-and-blue clubs. Villa, to our mind at least, are best served by a lighter claret. This looks dark which, when you also factor in the sleeves, leaves the whole thing coming off a little bit Burnley for our tastes.

There is, funnily enough, a semblance of an argument here that the bloated wrongness of the Adidas stripes almost works here, because by having them be light blue you almost end up with quite a light blue sleeve anyway.

But to accept that line of thinking is to give any credit at all to those stripes, and that’s not something we’re willing to do.

9. Crystal Palace home

Are there 10 worse kits out there than this one? Yes. Several more than 10, to be honest. As already discussed, every single Adidas home shirt across the world, for instance. But this one nevertheless earns its spot in our top 10 because it is by far the biggest disappointment among the 2026/27 offerings.

If you hear the words ‘Crystal Palace’ and ‘sash’ and ‘retro badge’ then your expectations will soar as high as any Eagle has ever soared. And the reality is, well, a bit crap.

This could have been so good and it just so isn’t. It’s as compelling a story of our times as any Expectation v Reality social-media reveal.

Fundamentally, what this needed was simplicity and it has instead been given extreme fussiness. The sleeves don’t need any of that nonsense they’ve got on them, and the sash absolutely does not need to be anything other than two solid blocks of colour.

The retro badge is lovely, but also inexplicably tiny. Already fighting against the busyness of the sash, it just gets lost entirely.

The 1976 inspiration for this kit had everything this one needed. Macron could and should have stuck far, far closer to the original.

Add in the awkward and unavoidable fact that on modern club shirts (rather than, say, Peru jerseys) you always run the risk of a great big ugly sponsor – and Palace this season are sadly duly saddled – spoiling the effect of a sash anyway.

As an aside, we will cheerfully support Gianni Infantino’s determination to have more and more teams at the World Cup right up until the point Peru definitely get in every time and no further. It’s just common sense.

As for this shirt, it’s just a massive shame and honking great missed opportunity.

The good news for Leeds is that Adidas have given them yet another absolutely first-class yellow away kit, complete this season with trefoil, but a very good run of home kits has come to a juddering halt.

Some joker has decided to put horizontal blue and yellow pinstripes on it. No idea why. Even on the few – and sometimes, it must be said, successful – occasions Leeds have added blue and yellow stripes to their kit they’ve been vertical.

Which is always, always, always a better option for a pinstripe. Don’t think it’s a massive spoiler to say this isn’t the biggest mess Adidas have got into with stripes on a Premier League home kit this season, but it’s nonetheless jarring just how much the legendary Brand With The Three Stripes are currently putting all manner of terrible stripes on their kits, both at the World Cup and the 26/27 season.

Let’s hope they snap out of it and get back on track by next season.

7. Norwich City third

Every year, by ancient footballing decree, somebody somewhere must wear a kit that looks like bus-seat upholstery.

In 2026/27, that will be Norwich thanks to their purple and lilac and mint-green third kit, that’s adorned with an actually quite striking monochromatic purple club crest and white logos for manufacturer Joma and sponsor Blakely that are thus almost entirely lost and camouflaged among the graphic print that so expertly replicates upholstery specifically designed to conceal unpleasant stains.

We can understand why Joma don’t want to be too visibly aligned with this shirt, but we’re not sure you’re too happy as a sponsor here.

As an aside, the bus-seat thing does appear here to be entirely intentional given the kit-launch photos are literally of the kit on a bus. We are yet to decide if this knowing level of meta skulduggery makes it all slightly better or much, much worse.

6. Lyon third

We’ve seen some people suggest this kit is good, and that having some fun with the Bad Adidas Stripes actually makes them more palatable.

To that we say a firm no. When someone sh*ts the bed, you don’t give them credit for being proud of it, or swirling said sh*t into interesting patterns.

The opposite, if anything.

5. Tottenham Hotspur third

Nike’s latest Spurs home kit offering is fine, with the geometric collar from the England World Cup away shirt and others adding a bit of interest to what is otherwise at the plainer and blander end of Spurs home shirt territory.

We accept we will not be met with universal agreement here, but we also like the daft away kit even if it is another in what’s become a well-trodden path for Nike and Spurs of ostentatiously wacky and out-there away kits. Like that swirly vaguely outer-space looking one from a few years back – you know the one we mean – it has charmed us.

With a good white home kit and a divisive but undeniably interesting dark away kit, one assumes we won’t have to see Spurs’ third shirt too often in a season where they can’t even kid you on it’s their ‘European away kit’.

And that’s just as well, because the third shirt is an absolutely minging shiny, stripy kind of thing in not one but two weak shades of purple, seemingly inspired by the very worst of the Pony Spurs kits from the late 90s, with a flimsy-looking collar and looking more like a set of pyjamas Morecambe or Wise might wear in bed.

Lovely topical reference for the youngsters there.

We’re especially annoyed because we’re actually quite partial to a purple kit. A good purple kit always puts us in mind of Fiorentina and Harchester United, and those are both good things. But it must, must be a strong and vibrant purple. You do not want a tepid purple or woke lilac in your palette. And here Spurs have both.

We do generally focus on the shirts for these rankings, but we do also need someone to explain those black socks to us.

4. Bournemouth home

We simply cannot tell you how triggering it is for us to see Hummel and Adidas serving up such bad kits this season. We are fair and entirely unbiased judges of every kit on the purity of its merits, but they’re our two favourites and they both seem to be suffering a crisis of some kind.

These are not so much football kits as a cry for help.

Now look, it’s obvious that the biggest (but not only) problem with this kit is that sponsor’s logo. And we try to be fair with these things. A lot of sponsor’s logos look unavoidably cack, and it’s just not reasonable or practical to expect any football club to go without in this day and age.

But if you are saddled with a ropey sponsor’s badge stinking up a large amount of your kit’s real estate, you don’t have to go and make it worse. And Bournemouth/Hummel have made it worse here by putting that border in that makes a sponsor’s logo that already looks like a sticker off an apple an active part of the shirt’s design. That’s a choice. A choice that has been made. A terrible, terrible choice.

Hummel have also, perhaps inspired by Adidas’ baffling decision to ruin their stripes, decided to muck about with their chevrons on this kit.

Please do not do that again, guys. Any of that.

3. Real Madrid

The whole collection, because it’s just bad. Obviously they’re far from alone in being saddled with a rotten fat-striped Adidas home kit this season. That’s par for the course. That’s to be expected.

But at least almost everyone else gets the genuinely significant consolation prize of a nice trefoil retro-themed away kit. Real Madrid get the trefoil, but not the retro. It’s just been bunged on a kit that looks far too modern for it, especially the collar, a jarring misstep when set against the lovely ribbed v-necks and crossover crew necks dished out on trefoil kits elsewhere.

The third kit is neither nowt nor summat, inoffensive on its own but rendered infuriating here by being so meh yet so comfortably the best of the bunch.

Worst of all, though, is that home kit. What in the Pantone catastrophe are those accent colours?

Now it should be noted that Real Madrid has a wider option of accent colours than most. Over the years black, a wide assortment of blues, deep royal purple (our favourite, for what it’s worth) and even gold – notoriously tricky to pull off without looking ghastly – have been successfully deployed as the counterpoint to the crisp, classic white base.

This year? Dark green and pink. Neither of them have any business being there. Certainly not both of them and certainly not with such prominence.

A flash of pink isn’t entirely unheard of on Madrid home shirts, but it certainly shouldn’t be the colour for the three stripes. Certainly not this year’s fat ones. It’s bad on the short sleeve and makes the long sleeve a complete non-starter.

The green is less jarringly out of place but still not right and does nothing to anchor this as a Real Madrid kit. A crucial test of any kit for us is: if you take away the club badge, could you still have a good stab at saying who it belonged to? You’d never get this right. Take away the Real Madrid badge and leave the Emirates logo and you’re left with something that looks entirely like an adequate Arsenal away kit. No more, no less.

2. Stoke City away

One’s own biases inevitably come into play with this kind of ranking. Not with the wrecked adidas stripes of course. All right-thinking people despise those. But most kit judgements are by necessity subjective.

And we really, really, really hate camo kits. Along with pretty much anything that turns football into war p*rn, which is also a big part of why November is our least favourite month of the year.

This Spitfire-inspired kit is going to be especially unbearable during Poppymas, of course, but we’re happy to report it’s eye-meltingly disgusting at any time of year. Green and diarrhoea brown may be fine colours to use on a military aircraft to make it harder for enemies to spot, but they make for a miserable football kit combination.

And also surely just a wildly unhelpful one. Being able to see your team-mates is usually considered a boon. Man United players infamously disappeared just by wearing grey, so who knows what will happen to Stoke in this actively camouflaged kit. Just a whole team of John Cenas.

The kit isn’t helped by the necessity to have a plain-back for nameset purposes. Macron have opted for a sort of gunmetal that makes it look like players are wearing half a bib. But it’s also telling that they didn’t go with either of the horrible main colours of the design for the plain bit.

We do, in isolation, like the red and blue cuffs. Those are inspired by the roundels from the Spitfire, and it occurs to us that if you wanted to do a Spitfire-inspired football kit then those red, white and blue roundels could produce a far better kit.

Although it could also just look like you’re a mod or mad into curling. There’s no doubt what anyone wearing this kit is into, with the added fact that the retail version contains even more ‘hurrah for war’ details – like a little picture of the Spitfire and so on – that have had to be removed from the players’ version to comply with the kit regulations.

Call us woke snowflakes if you must, but any football kit that has to dial down its war p*rn credentials just to pass muster with the League is going to get a strong ‘No’ from us.

1. Newcastle home

Not really sure why we bothered counting down from 10 to 1 like there was the hope of building any kind of suspense. Of course you all already knew what was number one.

It’s the worst kit of this season, and one destined to live on in infamy. Certain of at least mentions in dispatches whenever pub conversation turns to all-time kitastrophes.

It’s not just that it’s hideous in every way a kit can be hideous – although it is also that. It’s that it’s a Newcastle home shirt: i.e. one of the very easiest shirts in the whole game to just lazily turn out a banger.

So easy, in fact, that Adidas have just such a shirt in their bog-standard boilerplate Sunday League club template offerings. How can you have that, and then serve up this utter monstrosity for actual Newcastle United?

It’s a mind-boggling combination of wrongness that is so very complete that it doesn’t even at any point come close to some sort of knowingly kitsch ‘so bad its good’ arch enjoyability. It’s too sh*t even to wear ironically.

Let’s go through it. Obviously, even if this kit didn’t exist the number-one spot was going to go to an Adidas Equipment offering that’s bedevilled with those awful fat stripes. Those are duly present and incorrect here, but manage here to be only the second most egregiously offensive f*cking up of iconic stripes.

How have Adidas, of all companies, forgotten how to do stripes? What the actual f*ck are those? It’s easy to laugh, but a Newcastle-supporting friend of ours wore this up the Aldi, got accidentally scanned and is now the proud owner of a stand-up paddleboard. Doesn’t even fit in his flat. Adidas and Newcastle must condemn.

And we haven’t even started on the sponsor, which wasn’t confirmed when the kit was first launched to widespread laughing and despair, but we can now confirm does indeed make everything even worse than it was before, which was very bad indeed.