The best 10 World Cup kits including THAT Curacao away shirt | OneFootball

We’ve done the 10 worst kits of the World Cup. So now obviously we have to do the 10 best.

This was much, much harder. But in a good way. This was a top 10 that very much gave us the proverbial Nice Headache To Have. We have reluctantly left out a great many kits that we absolutely love because there simply wasn’t room for them all.

Painful, but obviously far better than scrabbling round to fill a 10 with stuff that’s just okay. Nothing here is just okay. Nothing would be just okay in a top 20. Even a top 30. There are other problems with the tournament, sure, but there are some great kits. And that’s the main thing, isn’t it?

Okay, it’s not really the main thing. But it is something.

10. Sweden away

You’ll quickly realise as we get through this that adidas away/third/goalkeeper kits are the best in show at this World Cup. These kits all benefit massively from a trefoil logo – which is always a win – and having proper adidas stripes instead of the horrible ones that have inexplicably been daubed over the shoulders of all the home kits.

Basically all of them, with the possible exception of Belgium which we’re not yet sure about, are great and any of them would be worthy of featuring in the top 10. But we can’t have them all in here. Argentina especially unlucky to miss out.

Sweden just make it into the top 10 with this patterned blue number. Big patterns are very much in at this World Cup and we are entirely 100 per cent on board with that.

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9. Norway home

Are you paying attention, USA? That’s how you put your whole damn flag on the kit without looking like absolute arseholes.

There’s even a graphic print inside the massive blue cross. It should absolutely be too much and not work. And yet, it does. Magnificently.

The inspiration for the design apparently comes from the 1997 Umbro shirt that also featured a prominent cross shifted over to the right-hand side.

But let us tell you now, that shirt was garbage. It looked like a Man United shirt that had suffered a catastrophic printing error. It was a mess, and not a hot one.

This is a thing of beauty all its own.

8. Scotland away

Be very easy indeed to just fill this whole top 10 with adidas trefoil stuff. We nearly just did 10 goalkeeper tops.

But while we’ve reluctantly included some non-adidas trefoil stuff, there must be place for this salmon-pink stunner from Scotland.

It’s flawless, frankly. The pink. The purple. The pinstripes. The adidas stripes. The big bold v-neck collar and chunky cuffs.

That is a proper football shirt and a thing of beauty. Just the thought of Scott McTominay bossing midfields while wearing it is making us feel things. We have to quickly remember John McGinn will also be wearing it just to calm ourselves down.

7. South Korea home

An absolute beauty, this, a fact rendered even more remarkable when you consider that the away kit is even better. We could lose and indeed have lost a good 45 minutes of our lives staring at pictures of Son Heung-min wearing these kits and smiling at us. We have no regrets.

An all-over pattern is always a bold choice for a kit, but Nike are very good at it. They almost always get the balance right; if you’ve having a dramatic graphic effect on the shirt itself, you need to keep the other details minimalist, simple and not in any way distracting. Given the geometric stylings of the collar on this template, it could easily have gone wrong – sticking with all red here is a masterstroke. Keeping the remaining details – cuffs, piping, side panels in unobtrusive black and white also just excellent decision-making.

Chuck in that gorgeous away kit, and South Korea are this year’s best dressed.

6. Ghana home

There’s always a kit, isn’t there? One that grabs everyone by the bollards and becomes a talking point all of its own. At the moment, Curacao’s away kit is getting that kind of attention and rightly so. We don’t think we’re giving away too many spoilers in saying we’ll come to it soon enough.

But the problem for the Curacao away kit is that we probably won’t actually see it during any actual games. That’s a setback.

That’s where Ghana come in. The wild pattern on here emanating out from the trademark black star is based on traditional cloth from the country. That’s all well and good, sure, but also it looks like a psychedelic spider’s web.

And although we’ve never realised it before, it turns out that we really, really like football shirts that look like they have a psychedelic spider’s web on them.

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5. Mexico third

Is it really as simple for adidas as this? Is all they have to do to get a guaranteed place in our top 10 take some proper adidas stripes (not the ghastly fat ones they’ve slapped on all their home shirts for some reason) and a trefoil, make them tricolour and put them on literally any shirt?

Yes. Yes it is. Mad how much time and effort they put into doing literally anything else with their kits to be honest. Just do this, lads. Any shirt, tricolour stripes, tricolour trefoil. That’s the formula. It literally never fails to produce absolute art.

But this would be great even without the tricolour stuff, with the print woven into the fabric evoking the iconic Mexico 1970 shirt and thus making this the most ‘reads Mundial once’ kit at this summer’s festivities.

4. France home

We don’t, as a general rule care for buttons on football shirts. That’s rugby behaviour in our view. But all rules have exceptions. All rules are there to be broken.

And the presence of a button on our number one home shirt from this World Cup should tell you how good the rest of this is. Just look at it, for crying out loud. It’s absolutely beautiful. Hang it in the etc.

And France’ll probably win the whole thing wearing it too, the swines.

3. Mexico goalkeeper away

We did give some thought to just filling this entire top 10 with different adidas away goalkeeper tops. We’d have been morally right to do it. We could have stared God in the face and said with our full chest that we meant it.

But we must also concede it might not have made for the most interesting content and wouldn’t really have shown off the full range of what the World Cup kits smorgasbord has to offer.

Consider this, then, a win not only for Mexico but for all the adidas away goalkeeper kits. They’re all on the same template, and all of them are lovely. We also particularly like the Argentina one, and are extremely taken by the fact Scotland have an equipment-logoed, fat-striped grey ‘home’ keeper kit and a trefoil-logoed, proper-striped grey ‘away’ keeper kit that is obviously far superior. And also that these exist among the five goalkeeper kits available to them for what will, let’s be honest, because it is the history of the Scotland, be a three-game North American stopover.

But Mexico takes the win. Why? Tricolour innit. Always. And putting those national colours on a two-tone purple base is just bold and brilliant. No notes.

It’s also Guillermo Ochoa, isn’t it. A man up there with Pele and Miroslav Klose as the most World Cup-coded of all time.

2. South Korea away

Everything that’s great about South Korea’s home shirt is also in place here. Bold all-over graphic given space to shine by a simple (but not simplistic) template. But this one is just even better.

Officially the colour is ‘space purple’ for those of you who enjoy the Dulux colour chart nonsense football-kit manufacturers like to indulge in. The important thing about space purple is that it’s a lovely colour.

And there’s also just no escaping the fact that going with so unapologetic a floral design – based around South Korea’s national flower mugunghwa – in a pastel colour is a statement choice at a tournament that exists under the whims and tantrums of the world’s most pathetic ‘alpha’ male.

1. Curacao away

We’ll grudgingly concede it’s not the worst thing about this World Cup, but the fact that if Curacao go out in the group stages as they likely will then the best and most talked-about kit of the entire tournament will never actually see the light of day is among the grave scandals that 2026 will be remembered for.

Particularly galling in a tournament that is cheerfully and unapologetically sh*tting on tradition wherever it can, and in an age where away kits are worn for absolutely no truly necessary reason all the time anyway, that Curacao will play all their home games wearing their perfectly adequate home kit rather than this spectacular masterpiece.

The shirt itself is absolutely very good, with a good, proper football shirt crossover crew collar, but it’s the colourway of those stripes that truly elevate this to greatness isn’t it?

We are once again asking adidas to stop f*cking about, stop overcomplicating matters, and just put tricolour trefoils and/or stripes (proper ones, mind) on all of their kits from now on.