Grimsby Town recreating their AC Milan era is the best new kit of 2026-27 | OneFootball

Stop the count. With weeks to go and many yet to be unveiled, the best new kit for 2026-27 has already been decided.

Sorry, Sunderland. Well played, ADO Den Haag. Good game, Bayern Munich. But once Grimsby Town got back together with Lotto, it was never a fair fight.

Those fishy fashionistas have been building up to this, having trawled through their archive for a few seasons now. But they have really got us on the hook for their new away strip. Which also happens to be their best-ever old one.

This season, Grimsby will run out looking once again like 1990s AC Milan.

Three decades ago, Milan and the Mariners were unlikely kit twins. In 1995-96, the Italian giants unveiled a controversial fourth Lotto kit, which boiled p*ss on the Curva Sud because it was blue. Inter are blue. Not that shade of blue, obviously, but still blue.

Presumably inspired by Maldini, Baresi, Weah, Baggio and Boban, when Grimsby joined the Lotto stable a year later, the Mariners thought ‘we’ll have a bit of that’.

So Town hit the road in 1996-97 wearing an identical light blue away kit to Milan, but with a different badge and sponsor.

Not much of Milan’s magic rubbed off on Laws, Lee, Lester and Mendonca. They were relegated from what is now League One. But, Christ, they dressed sharp en route to Division Two.

Their look was timeless, clearly, since 30 years later, they will once again don Milanista blue on their travels.

And absolutely fair f***s to Lotto. Almost every club ‘takes inspiration’ from their previous kits, but the Italian manufacturer has gone Route One by simply copying what worked before.

Which is entirely the right approach. With this kit, a half-baked tribute act wouldn’t have worked.

Really, this design – a weird mash-up of lines, stripes, diamonds and triangles – shouldn’t work. But it definitely does. It deserves its second act as a like-for-like copy. Anything less would have looked like a tacky fake for sale in a Spanish resort.

The peril with recreating old glories is often the new sponsor. But Blackrow Group have migrated from the sleeve to the front of the new shirt, blending in almost seamlessly with the old ‘Europe’s Food Town’, from a time when Grimsby was selling itself as the continent’s food processing capital and claiming to produce more pizzas than Italy. The caveat to that is acknowledged in an equally-fine unveiling video.

Of course, in the 1990s, there was no such thing as back-of-the-shirt sponsors. Certainly, neither Baresi nor Ivano Bonetti were running around with ‘Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner’ scrawled beneath their number.

We’ll give that a pass. It’s Grimsby Town doing peak-Milan – it should be slightly absurd. And, mercifully, it doesn’t spoil the main aesthetic of the best new club shirt of 2026-27.