Ranking every 2026-27 Premier League home kit: Perfect pinstripes, a horror sponsor and one just like the sweater from Friends

This is a slightly curious case, because it looks exactly like a shirt that Toffs — the company that produced reproductions of very old shirts from the early 1900s and beyond — would have put out. That’s partly because it sort of is: the shirt is inspired by Hull shirts from the 1970s, even to the extent of using their old badge rather than the one with the tiger that we’re mostly familiar with. It’s quite jarring: on the one hand it’s unusual and thus stands out, but on the other, it doesn’t look like a shirt a team in 2026 should be wearing and you get the strong sense that their players will just look like a bunch of 40-year-old dads playing five-a-side at their local Powerleague.

Hmmm, yes. A great example of how a sponsor’s logo can wreck an an otherwise perfectly decent shirt. The Vitality logo is slapped onto the torso in such a way that it looks a bit like a “60 per cent off’ sticker on some soon-to-go-out-of-date supermarket chicken. It’s also slightly jarring that there’s a black ring around the pink circle of the logo, presumably to ensure it stands out better than it would against the red stripes: we’re all grown up enough to realise that football clubs do bend to their sponsors, but it still feels slightly icky that their shirt design has to adapt to the people paying the bills, rather than the other way around. It’s a shame because the background pattern on the red stripes depicts the club’s original logo from the 1930s, which would have been a really nice touch were it not for the big pink distraction.

Roll up for some top-drawer kit sales nonsense from Adidas, which reports that: “Marking the 400th anniversary of the Leeds town charter, the Leeds United 26/27 Home Jersey is a bold tribute to the city’s enduring football culture.” O… K. It just looks like a white shirt with some horizontal blue and yellow pinstripes to us, but what do we know? This has clearly been a bit of a contentious one and you can understand why: stripped of context, it looks pretty nice, but take the badge off and you’d have difficulty identifying it as a Leeds shirt. These things matter: if you subscribe to the old Jerry Seinfeld line about sports fandom essentially boils down to “cheering laundry”, given everything else about these clubs is transient, it does mean something for a team to look distinct.

There’s something slightly strange going on here, in that you look at this Fulham shirt and you’re convinced that they’ve had this design a few times before. Which they sort of have: it’s pretty similar to their 2022-23 home shirt and pretty similar to a few others too. Perhaps this is just a consequence of having a black and white home shirt but there are ways of jazzing these things up. For the most part, most semi-obsessed football fans could look at a shirt and pretty well identify the season it belongs to, but in a few years, you’d probably struggle with this one.

It’s not automatically a bad thing when a club diverts from their traditional kit design to try something new but when they do it, you’d prefer them to come up with something interesting or radical. This isn’t the first time that Villa have strayed from the classic ‘claret body, light blue sleeves’ combo but most of the previous times, it’s been a bit more of a departure, notably the thick-striped effort from the late 1990s that clad the Paul Merson/Dion Dublin/Ugo Ehiogu team. This is just… a shirt. It’s fine — clean, simple, no frills — but it’s just… a shirt. The blurb boasts that it “draws inspiration from Villa’s most unconventional kits”, which they could argue is technically true given it’s unconventional for them, but it’s still… a shirt. It feels like the equivalent of someone saying “I know this is a controversial opinion, right, but…” before announcing that they like cheese.

Just the wrong side of the ‘is it clean and simple or is it boring and unimaginative?’ line. Just, mind you: it’s not terrible and the restrained dashes of yellow that occasionally make an appearance on Everton shirts are always welcome. Castore’s sell for this one is that the design draws “inspiration from marine flags found at the city’s docks” and that the shirt “brings a fresh twist to a nostalgic source of inspiration”. Which isn’t entirely untrue but you have to squint pretty hard to actually see those marine flags, which renders it all partly pointless.

A divergence from convention like this is always going to be a room-splitter but at the very least you have to take your hats off to Crystal Palace and Macron for trying something different that nonetheless has some grounding in the club, a connection to their past. Palace have dabbled with the sash/mainly white shirts with blue-and-red trim combo a number of times with their away kits, but there was a time, mainly the 1970s and 1980s, when this theme was their default. However, while the concept is strong, there is a sense that the execution doesn’t quite live up to it. It’s just a bit… busy: the sash is a bit too wide and the bars on the shoulders are far too big. They are awarded points for the return of their circular request but in summary, this is a flawed, if admirable effort.

“Set on the club’s classic white, the shirt features sharper, faster and more cutting-edge visuals than ever before” — so claims the Nike blurb, which is… well, do you think even they believe it? This is just a white shirt with a couple of blue bits dabbed here and there, and some strange slashing patterns on the background that you can’t really see if you’re more than a few yards away. It looks fine and those cuffs are actually quite nice, but it’s not sharp, fast or cutting edge.

Very nice. In case you’re wondering why the colour on the collar and cuffs is ‘honey yellow’… because they’re the Bees! It is genuinely quite a nice touch to introduce a fresh colour to a shirt without it being something random, and you wonder why they haven’t thought of it before given the yellow has always been there since they changed their badge to incorporate the bee back in 2017. Joma isn’t known for producing the best-looking kits but this is a big improvement on the last two seasons (Brentford are again sticking two fingers to modern consumerism and retaining this new home shirt, like the previous one, for two seasons rather than one).

This feels like a bit of a halfway house between recent Arsenal kits, which have stuck with the classic configuration of having a red body with white sleeves, the main point of difference being the colour of the three Adidas stripes. They’ve previously had white, gold, dark blue and, last season red, so this time they’ve gone for… two types of red. It does look slightly weird not having all three stripes as the same colour, almost as if — and this is clearly not actually true — they forgot to order enough dark stripes, so had to whack some old lighter ones on to make up the numbers. That aside, this is a perfectly nice shirt, the other variance coming on the collar and trim, which is apparently inspired by the architecture of the Emirates to celebrate 20 years at the stadium.

Very good. You do start to worry that kit designers are running out of ideas when they cite the configuration of the floodlights at a stadium as an inspiration for their shirts, but when it results in as pleasing a design as this, then it doesn’t really matter. If you’re quibbling, you could probably do without the black parts of the trim and just leave the white to pop a little more, but we’re firmly into nit-picking territory here.

Plenty of clubs go retro but Sunderland have reeeeeallllly gone retro with this one, their 2026-27 home kit being a tribute to their shirt from… 1937, when they won the FA Cup for the first time. And not just that this apes the design but look closely and you’ll see an ’S’- shaped design all over the shirt, which are actually reproductions of the FA Cup handles. And inside the collar, they have stitched the names of their players from that game. That link to the past is great but even if it wasn’t there, then this looks pretty nice — fairly basic when you look at it from a distance but with more to it when you zoom in.

Now this is a proper Manchester United shirt, and I’ll tell you why: they have nailed the correct colour proportions for a United shirt. You want the main body to be red, obviously, then you want the trim to be white and you want the secondary trim — about a third of the area covered by the white — to be black. And that’s exactly what we’ve got here, with the Adidas stripes in white but the black making sparing appearances on the collar and cuffs. The blurb says it’s inspired by United’s shirts from the mid-1970s, but it’s also reminiscent of their shirt from 1990 just with a collar. Very good.

This is such a clear and literal tribute to a Liverpool kit of the past, designed to appeal to nostalgists of a certain age, that I feel like a bit of a rube falling for it. But ultimately: who cares! What a kit! It would look great even if it wasn’t a direct tribute to their shirt from 1989-1991, those white flecks and dashes on the red background making it look a bit like a decorator’s overalls… but in a good way. It’s absolutely sensational, the best Liverpool have looked in years — and they have looked pretty good. Not even the weirdly thick stripes down the shoulders that Adidas is insisting on using for all its shirts can ruin it.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Welcome back to the Premier League, Coventry City: you look fabulous. Those of us old enough to remember the last time Coventry were in the top flight were delighted to see them return, a rush of nostalgia flowing around us as we closed our eyes and thought about names such as Noel Whelan, Darren Huckerby and Mustapha Hadji. And the really great news is that they’re not just back, but back with the best home shirt of the season. The mottled pattern — apparently inspired by the celebrations following their victory in the 1987 FA Cup final — in the blue stripes contrasts beautifully with the white, the collar is clean and simple, and even the sponsor’s logo stands out splendidly. Superb.