Ranking every England World Cup home shirt since 1966 from worst to best | OneFootball

England’s 2026 World Cup kits have been unveiled, and the home kit is a triumph.

It took Nike a little while to warm up, but they’re now on a rare run of England from across the last few tournament cycles.

This latest effort may be their best yet, which inevitably set us to thinking. Where might it sit in the entire Umbro-dominated and Admiral-punctuated England World Cup kit pantheon?

So, obviously, we’ve ranked every England World Cup home kit going all the way back to 1966. Because that’s the first proper World Cup that matters, isn’t it?

13. South Africa 2010

Umbro were basically checking out by this point. This represented the absolute low point of the lazy white-polo-shirt-with-an-England-badge-that’ll-be-60-quid-please era of making football shirts that didn’t actually look like football shirts so you could wear them with jeans to the pub.

It was made worse by the Umbro badge being in red rather than blue. Red is a very correct accent colour on an England shirt, but it should (almost) always be the third colour behind navy blue. It can absolutely, in the right circumstances, be used for a nameset, but again, we really do need to see some navy somewhere before we’re going to allow that. These here were not the right circumstances.

The very similar shirt Umbro released for the Women’s World Cup the following year was no less lazy-looking, but did have the Umbro badge in blue and looked far better for this minor but vital tweak.

12. Qatar 2022

There is a strong case that sky blue belongs only on an England goalkeeper or third shirt, but there is precedent from Euro 96 and we’re happy to allow it. But only if used judiciously and carefully. Had that light blue been restricted to the sleeve cuffs, all would be well. Even the little flashes at the hem were okay.

But those shoulders are an absolute nightmare. Far too much blue and also far too many blues. All of the blues are here. And they got so bogged down putting all the blues on the shoulders there that they completely forgot about putting a collar in at all.

England shirts can – nay, must – have blue detailing but they absolutely must not have blue sleeves or shoulders and it’s genuinely staggering that Nike apparently needed to be told this again after the Euro 2016 ‘ice blue’ sleeves debacle.

11. France 1998

Falls into what we call the Bolton Trap. England shirts done right should look quite a bit like Spurs shirts and quite a bit like Bolton shirts but not like they could just perfectly suit either club simply by changing the badge. Stick a Bolton badge on this and you’re 100 per cent good to go.

The big issue is too much red too near the front of the shirt. Yes, the big red bits on each side are, in theory, balanced out by the big blue bits, but their placement gives the red far greater prominence.

We also, and here we’ll admit we’re just leaning on vibes and can’t really explain this properly in any acceptable way, just think those navy bits of business at the end of the sleeve absolutely scream Bolton Wanderers on a shirt that should scream Michael Owen.

10. Brazil 2014

A forgettable World Cup for England in a suitably forgettable first tournament effort from Nike.

It was probably wise to go for a subdued, plain opening attempt but if anything, Clive, they might have done that too well. We’d wager with some confidence that this is the least memorable England kit on this entire list.

Kits can be memorable for reasons both good and bad, of course, but it’s usually preferable to being forgettable. It’s not like with referees.

The problem as ever with a nearly entirely plain white England shirt is that no matter how many design hours have gone into every element of it the end result just looks lazy.

The white-on-white shield for the Three Lions doesn’t quite work, either, and what little blue there is here is insufficiently dark.

Apparently it’s not royal blue but is in fact ‘sport royal’ which we’re sure is very different in important ways we quite simply do not care to understand.

9. Russia 2018

Offensively bland. The Ed Sheeran of England shirts. We can’t even be bothered to talk about it. Thank heavens England didn’t actually win the thing wearing this. It would have been mortifying.

8. Germany 2006

The red cross on the right shoulder instantly transports us back to Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo and miserably inept penalties. None of that is really the shirt’s fault if we’re honest, and we must try to remain objective here.

It’s okay, this one. Bit of asymmetry is always a gamble on a football shirt but a welcome one and in all our kit rankings we will generally come down harsher on kits that are too plain rather than those that are too busy.

We have slightly different feelings about national team home shirts in this regard, with purity given greater weight, but a stylised nod to the country’s literal flag cannot be inherently a bad thing unless you’ve got 15 of them on your house and four on your car or – heaven forbid – you get remotely playful with the colour scheme.

There’s also just enough navy knocking about on this one to justify the red. That piping at the hem of the shirt? Absolutely key.

7. Mexico 1970

In design terms, it’s just the 1966 kit again. It really was a simpler time. Same kit design for successive World Cups? Jumpers for goalposts? Isn’t it? Marvellous.

With the 1970 World Cup taking place in Mexico rather than Blighty, England did opt for a more lightweight ‘Airtex’ version of the classic all-white, round-collared jersey.

Which was obviously entirely sensible but also just does look flimsier and less structured a garment.

That, plus the fact England did play two games of the 1970 tournament in all white, which is incorrect of them, happily means we can conjure up a couple of halfway-valid reasons to drop this below 1966 that aren’t just ‘didn’t win it, did we?’

Because let’s be real, if we’re judging a kit’s value by what England’s men have won wearing it, then most of them are in trouble.

6. England 1966

The obvious oddity with the 1966 World Cup, beyond the simple fact of England winning the thing, is that it must be the only England World Cup home kit whose fame is entirely dwarfed by the away’s.

All those iconic images from the final obviously feature England in their red change kit, with Sir Geoff Hurst’s red-shirted hat-trick in the final so much more famous than Sir Bobby Charlton’s home-kit double against Portugal in the semi.

Both kits are timeless classics, of course, and possessed of a beautiful simplicity. It’s still the best plain England kit of all time and not just because of the success with which it is so indelibly linked.

It is objectively better than every subsequent attempt at a strikingly plain kit England have ever made, with its entire lack of fuss and simple white round collar.

5. Japan/South Korea 2002

A bold and risky triumph, that takes just enough of a gamble to stand out but knows to play safe with the rest of the design having made its point.

The asymmetric red stripe behind the badge pays off handsomely, with the solid amounts of lovely navy trim and piping to be found all around the place meaning a more than acceptable balance of the three colours is achieved.

A simple white and navy V-neck was a perfect collar choice here; anything fussier would’ve been too busy and undoubtedly interfered with that red feature element.

We’d make a strong argument for the overall kit package in 2002 being England’s best of the 21st century by quite a long way, because the red away kit was another absolute triumph, with the England flag subtly incorporated into the collar and cuffs.

England’s away kit should always be red, of course, which is just yet another obvious point of principle that we’ve allowed to become eroded because we simply are not anywhere near French enough about taking to the streets in the face of this kind of arrant nonsense.

You want to make a blue England kit? You go right ahead and we’ll all agree it’s a third kit. But you will never take away our red away kits. Is what we should have insisted, but no, we’re too bloody meek aren’t we?

Now it’s apparently acceptable to alternate between red and blue away kits because absolutely nothing is sacred in this godforsaken age.

4. USA/Canada/Mexico 2026

Excellent, this. All the important things that were right about the excellent, p*ss-boiling Euro 2024 home kit are still right about this, which like that is unapologetically a football top and so much better for it.

First big plus: a proud golden World Cup star. Damn straight. We’d all like another one on there – Thomas Tuchel has spoken specifically about achieving this – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the one we do have. The false modesty of a white-on-white star has always been unconvincing anyway given how much we love banging on about 1966 and all that.

The rest of the shirt? Almost spot on, in our view. We’ve touched on our England home shirt blueprint before: you need enough navy for it to look like it could be a Spurs kit, but then enough red to make it clear it isn’t, but that blue and red balanced delicately enough that it doesn’t all get too Bolton. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

The biggest test of ‘is this Bolton?’ here actually ends up being the navy piping at the shoulder but we think they’ve just about got away with it.

Lovely balance of the correct three colours at the collar and cuffs, and the red-with-blue-piping side detail could not have been better handled. The little bit of triangular business under the round collar might have annoyed us but we’re happy to report it does not.

The increased visibility of the red side detailing when viewed from the back might have tempted us to go with a blue nameset but it’s a very minor quibble indeed. And the smaller front-of-shirt number absolutely looks right in navy-trimmed red so on balance we’re fine with all of that.

We really have only one concern at this stage. We like the collar very much, but in some of the pictures we’ve seen – and thus modelled by professional athletes with professional athletes’ bodies – that collar looks like it might err on the side of the baggy.

It has a slightly loose look on the neck of even a Harry Kane or Jude Bellingham that just ever so slightly detracts from the overall vibe.

Good chance we’re fretting about nothing here, but it’ll be a shame if it makes official 90-quid replicas look a little bit like £13 fakes from those sites none of us know about.

We currently, if anything, slightly prefer the more geometrically bold collar choice on the away shirt.

Although we do accept that would be a bigger risk on a home shirt and also reserve the right to completely abandon this opinion and insist we never held it at all.

3. Mexico 1986

A return for Umbro as England’s World Cup kit manufacturer for the first time since 1970 and, for the first time, the Double Diamond given prominent space on an England World Cup kit.

Funny to think now of it not being immediately apparent which manufacturer has made a particular kit, especially with Umbro being so synonymous with England kits and making their most famous ones of all in 1966.

This is a lovely slice of 1980s football kit styling. The self-striped shiny shirt material. The chunky, no-nonsense v-neck collar that simply demands respect.

The only reason this loses points at all is because its most famous (infamous?) appearance in the tournament itself came in mash-up form, with England pairing the shirt with the light blue shorts and socks from their third kit (which for some reason had for this tournament replaced the red version as the designated away) for the quarter-final against Argentina.

Therefore perhaps a relief, in a way, that the image from this most memorable of games that is most indelibly seared into our collective memory is not of any pale-blue-clad outfielder but instead of a shiny, silvery Peter Shilton failing to raise his studs even an inch above the Azteca turf.

2. Spain 1982

Admiral’s sole entry in the England World Cup kit pantheon – having had the misfortune to be the official kit supplier during an otherwise barren decade between 1974 and 1984 – is nevertheless an absolute stone-cold classic.

We will always have a soft spot for kits that break all the rules but manage to pull it off. This one does that with knobs on.

One of our absolutely fundamental England kit rules is that it shouldn’t have blue (or red) shoulders or sleeves. Every other time it’s been attempted, it’s looked unspeakably naff.

Think of the ‘ice blue’ sleeves that ruined the Euro 2016 kit, or whatever the heck that cascade of blue over the shoulders in 2022 was meant to be. See? Dreadful.

But this? Absolutely first class. We’ve always assumed this kit and its red away version were the inspiration for the equally magnificent and iconic 1992 Cricket World Cup shirts, but we have no evidence for that and don’t want to find any lest it disprove a theory we’re very comfortable just accepting as fact.

Those red, white and blue stripes across the shoulders are just a wonderful thing, and even now seeing this kit does something to us. At the risk of going full pseud here, there’s something of the modern art about it. Something about that arrangement of shape and colour that is just so satisfying.

Hang it in the Louvre is what we’re saying here. Or, you know, a modern art gallery. We don’t really know what we’re talking about, if we’re honest. Let’s get back to football kits.

Also worth noting that the blue – both on the shirt and the shorts – isn’t navy like it’s supposed to be. And still, despite now breaking two of the golden England kit rules, it works flawlessly. Makes you think.

1. Italy 1990

There’s always a danger with this kind of historical list that, as with music or TV shows or pretty much anything else, those that come along in those vital formative years can take on an elevated status.

Just as by sheer coincidence everyone believes that the best music in all of history happened to be made when they were a teenager, so it can be with World Cups.

And, dear reader, for us, Italia 90 is that World Cup. We know it was, by most raw footballing measures, actually a rubbish World Cup. So dominated did it become by turgid safety-first football that it hastened the already inevitable arrival of the backpass rule.

In many ways, it could be said that the 1990 World Cup at times reached such levels of unwatchability that it in fact saved football from itself. Arsenal are currently attempting something similar.

To our eight-year-old mind, though, the 1990 World Cup was perfect. While in adulthood we have come to accept that okay, a lot of the football involved was genuinely terrible, we remain unswerving in our belief that its cultural footprint is vast and positive.

The on-screen graphics have never been bettered in any sport before or since. Ciao was a charming mascot despite seemingly being fashioned by some terrifying God-playing scientist in the hills above Milan out of a football and those little plastic blocks you used to count to 10 at primary school.

The Italia 90 Orbis sticker album remains perhaps the greatest single artefact in the entire history of football.

‘Album’ doesn’t do it any justice, does it? It was a three-ring binder built up over weeks and months and only rendered even more magical by the idiosyncrasies that came from its part-work release beginning before the actual qualifying teams were confirmed.

Then you’ve got World In Motion, a proper song by a proper band. Unheard of at the time.

So yes, Italia 90 might not have been a great football World Cup, but culturally it dominates.

And we’ve not even got to the kits yet. It is chock full of absolute classics, several from the very end of the adidas trefoil era, most notably of course a Germany home kit that, for our money, takes its place on the all-time podium along with Netherlands 1988 and Denmark 1986. Again, the era all these shirts come from is entirely coincidental to this objective correctness.

But what of England? Yes. Sorry, we got lost in reverie for a while there and forgot this is actually supposed to be about England kits. England’s Italia 90 home kit, the jersey of Gascoigne and Lineker and Waddle and Pearce and Platt was, fittingly in the end, almost but not quite as good as the Germans’.

It was a bold kit featuring a distinctive and unusual collar and a beautiful use of the Umbro Double Diamond in the ribbon material at the sleeve end.

Our heart still sinks at the sight of the many, many knock-off versions of this kit that still proliferate and in which this vital detail lacks the diamonds and contains merely lines.

If you can’t include a kit’s stand-out detail in your knock-off, then at least have the decency not to bother at all.

The subsequent official Umbro re-issue, complete with our doomed hero Gascoigne’s bright red 19 on the back, at least avoids this crime and holds pride of place in the wardrobe of many Gen Xers and ancient millennials.