2026 World Cup Kit Rankings Part Two: 36-25 including Scotland & Spain… | OneFootball

We’re on to part two of our World Cup kit rankings as we head towards the mid-table strivers.

And it does speak to the general quality of this year’s kits that well before we’re finished with this bottom half of the table we’re getting to some we really like. And some we would really like if it wasn’t for those adidas stripes. Sigh. Deep cleansing breaths, deep cleansing breaths. Those stripes will see us led away to a padded room before the tournament is through.

You can check out the first instalment of our rankings here, where the real stinkers reside.

36. Scotland

Would be absolutely fine in any other adidas era. There is almost nothing wrong with this. It’s a lovely deep navy with just the right amount of shine for a proper football kit. The saltire pattern is both neat and subtle, and the centred Scotland crest is correctly accompanied by a centred adidas Equipment logo.

But it’s the very correctness of it all, the lack of gaudy OTT designs, that makes the bad thing stand out.

Of all the adidas shirts that have been conspicuously besh*tted by adidas’ genuinely disgusting decision to f*ck about with the width of their iconic three stripes for quite literally no reason other than absolutely nothing being sacred any more in this godless age in which we live, this is perhaps the shirt that has been most conspicuously besh*tted by adidas’ genuinely disgusting decision to f*ck about with the width of their iconic three stripes for quite literally no reason other than absolutely nothing being sacred any more in this godless age in which we live.

The fact that this is so close to being great is what ultimately makes it bad. The infuriating, maddening, unnecessary pointlessness of it.

Fair warning: there are still plenty more adidas home kits to come here and we will whinge and p*ss and moan about the stripes on every single one of them.

35. Ecuador

Ecuador’s kit is yellow with blue and red trim and what Marathon have produced here is a yellow kit with blue and red trim. You can’t say they haven’t done that, because they have.

What you can say is that they have done absolutely nothing else at all beyond hitting those core requirements of the brief.

34. South Africa

A bad time to jump back in with adidas as South Africa bid adieu to Le Coq Sportif and find themselves saddled with the fat stripes on a dull and dreary home kit that has absolutely nothing about it to distract from the stripe-based calumny.

There is a pattern on the shirt that supposedly draws inspiration from the country’s linguistic diversity but it’s a flimsy idea meekly delivered.

As ever for any national team with colours that are yellow with green accents, you are always a little bit stuck but need to do something to avoid looking like Temu Brazil.

Adidas and South Africa have not tried on this occasion, with a round green collar, if anything, leaning into the look and making things as Brazil as they could possibly be.

33. Morocco

Not the worst, by Puma standards at least. The collar is two collars having a fight neither can win, but the intricacy of the upper collar does kind of give it the feel of feature rather than bug.

We’re trying not to let our instinctive distaste for buttons on football shirts influence us unduly. We know that’s our issue to work through, nobody else’s. What we will say is the textile pattern from the collar works even better on the sleeve cuffs that we actually enjoy in an entirely uncomplicated way.

Gold accents can be tough to pull off, but restricting them to the Puma cat means it works well enough here.

As we will always say, though: if you have two logos on the chest of a football shirt and are centring one of them you must, must, must in fact centre both of them or lose all balance. There is nothing inherently wrong with a centred crest, but it can unbalance everything when not handled sensitively.

There is a possible escape route here, however; we haven’t yet seen this shirt with namesets applied. If the front number is on the left breast, the whole ensemble may take an unexpected move towards Actually Decent.

32. Croatia

Never trust anyone who isn’t partial to a Croatia checkerboard kit. It’s a major tournament staple. This, alas, isn’t the best iteration. But nor is it the worst.

For us, the squares in the pattern are simply smaller than optimal and we would prefer to see them across the entire shirt rather than with that central panel left uncovered.

They’ve left that central panel entirely plain, we assume, in order to accommodate the front-of-shirt number without requiring a cutaway.

We’re okay with that choice, but it just comes back to the size of the pattern for us. Zoom in on your checkerboard by around 500 per cent and you can always craftily place a sufficiently large white square just where you need it.

As an aside, and as is correct and proper, Croatia’s away kit is the same as the home kit but in two-tone blue. Even when the home kit is slightly wrong, it remains paramount that Croatia’s away kit be the same but in two-tone blue. These are the rules.

31. Qatar

Given adidas’ proud history of making dramatic use of striking geometric shapes in their kits, the zig-zag element of the Qatari flag should be an absolute gift.

But it’s just been used in a really boring way here down the middle of a shirt that, with its simple white round collar, just has absolutely nowhere near enough going on to distract you from, you guessed it, the horrendous adidas stripes.

We are sorry we keep banging on about it, but it really isn’t our fault. Adidas are responsible for about a third of all kits at this World Cup and have managed to somehow f*ck up the most un-f*ck-up-able thing in all of modern sportswear.

It’s staggering that this was ever signed off on, and we demand to speak to the manager. It’s cultural vandalism, is what it is.

And deep down they know it too, because it’s only the home kits they’ve destroyed. All the aways and thirds have proper adidas stripes as nature intended.

30. Spain

Can’t fully explain how, but using the colours of the Spanish flag on the fat adidas stripes does almost save them. Those navy blue sleeves, which would otherwise be a flaw, definitely also coming to the rescue here.

The lesson from this kit is that if adidas must insist on using this terrible version of their stripes, then you need three colours to achieve the least bad version of it. One in the base, two in the stripes. We think it also helps that the base colour for the stripes is not the base colour for the shirt.

Still, though, this would clearly rank higher without the stripe disgrace at all, because there’s a lot to like elsewhere. We do enjoy a pinstripe on a football shirt, and while we would normally baulk at the decision to put some kind of em-dash detail into said stripes, here we rather like it.

The seemingly straightforward crew collar also conceals a secret. Like a mullet, it’s business at the front and party at the back, where it cuts away unexpectedly to reveal a jaunty little ‘Espana’ text, again in the colours of the flag.

29. Iran

Iran have stuck with local sportswear brand Majid, and been rewarded with a shirt that features a bloody great big Asiatic cheetah on it. More football shirts should feature images of critically endangered big cats.

They’re not done there, either, with cheetah spots on the sleeves that are finished off with a subtle bit of flag-colour cuffery at the end.

It’s a bit different and fair play to it for that. Should definitely be good for at least three or four minutes of commentary whimsy during a low-intensity group game at some point over the weeks ahead.

28. Australia

The sheer scale of Australia’s wider sporting cultural footprint means they can avoid the South Africa pitfalls of having to design a canary yellow and green football kit in a world where Brazil exist.

Australians will also argue until red in the face that it’s not canary yellow, it’s gold. It’s not gold. It’s yellow. They’re not Wolves. But it is, we’ll cheerfully concede, a far deeper yellow than bright Brazilian yellow.

There’s a halfway interesting collar here, which along with the Brazil stuff means we at least have something to talk about because there’s not much else going on here.

Nothing particularly wrong with that. Not every shirt has to scream “LOOK AT ME” – especially if you’ve got an away shirt doing it as loudly as the Aussies have. Dearie me, that one’s a honker.

27. Turkey

We genuinely cannot keep up with which way round Turkey have decided to go with their kits from one tournament to the next.

In our heads their home kit should be red and their away kit should be white, but sometimes and for no real reason this seems to be the other way round.

We think this year they’ve got it the ‘right’ way round but it doesn’t help that the design of the shirts is so similar to their Euro 2024 but with roles apparently reversed.

A white shirt with red band around the chest is now the away, having officially been the home for the Euros, with an all-red number now the home having been the away two years ago.

What this year’s kits do have, whichever way round they go, is a nice swirly pattern on the red bits. Hooray for nice swirly patterns on the red bits.

26. New Zealand

More home/away kit confusion here. We are, reluctantly, going along with Puma here and their assertion that the black kit is the home and the white the away.

In football at least, New Zealand are traditionally the other way round. They are literally known as the All Whites. But Puma have this listed as the home shirt, so we’ll go with that even though we’re like 93 per cent sure they’ve got that wrong even though they should really know.

Both kits are similar in design anyway, Puma going for a sleek look with a decent swirly all-over graphic built around the Silver Fern doing just enough to elevate things beyond the humdrum. But we definitely prefer the black version.

The inevitable downside with going for black as the home, if indeed that is what they’ve done, is that you’re dealing with a relatively small football nation that has a far larger cultural footprint in other team sports where black is the default home choice.

You are unavoidably left with a shirt that makes you think rugby and one-day cricket before you think of football.

But the more we consider it, the more we come to the view that this isn’t really the fault of the kit and is more that New Zealand are just more widely associated with and better known – and, let’s be real, just better – at those other sports.

25. Iraq

Jako are the lads behind Iraq’s World Cup kits and they’ve come up with a pleasing 1980s vibe here.

To many of us, the 1980s will always represent the platonic ideal of the football kit. The point where kits really started to become specifically rather than generically iconic.

Your Denmark 86s, your Netherlands 88s, that Tottenham kit with the chevrons all across it, the classic adidas big-club efforts with Liverpool, Arsenal and Man United.

Anyway, this evokes that era so well that it almost veers off into looking like an old Luton Town shirt. We don’t even really hate that as an idea, to be honest.

If we’re being picky, the design within the fabric of the shirt is too fussy. There are at least three different sections to it with circles used to form, from top to bottom, triangles and then Vs and then diamonds and then triangles again.

All fine on their own, all slightly too much when put together.