We’ve taken care of the home kits for the Women’s World Cup.
We cast our eyes and made rapid-fire judgements over designs that some people probably worked on for years, so now it’s time to go again: with the away kits.
GO DEEPER
Rating the Women’s World Cup home kits: France? Wrong blue! Nigeria? My eyes! USA? Room-splitter!
This is where kit designers traditionally go a little off-piste, so perhaps there will be some interesting choices to come…
Argentina
Little spoiler for the rest of this piece because, presumably, you are reading it from start to finish like the finest piece of narrative literature it is: the people in charge of the away shirts have either absolutely excelled themselves or shown a depressing lack of imagination.
The first example of the former comes with this banger of an Argentinian shirt, which looks like no other Argentina shirt you’ve seen before, but that’s OK because it’s an away shirt. Creative licence can flow.
This is apparently inspired by the country’s Quebrada de Humahuaca mountain range, but do you need to know that to enjoy the aesthetics of this delightful shirt? No, you do not.
Rating: 9
Australia
(Photo: Tom Dulat/Getty Images)
Having pumped up the tyres of the Adidas designers just there, this one is a bit… meh. There seems to have been two options for teams this year with their change shirts: play it safe with a template and they’ll just mix up the colours a bit, or allow a bit more improvisation and invention and take more of a risk, but probably end up with something that stands out a bit more. Australia have gone for the former and, as such, we get this mint-coloured number, about which it is very difficult to raise any emotions either way.
Rating: 6
Brazil
(Photo: Evaristo Sa/AFP via Getty Images)
Presumably, it was a conscious choice to go for a design that is similar to the Brazilian men’s team’s away kit at their World Cup, but with a twist to the pattern on the sleeves. This works quite nicely: enough similarity to keep it “of a theme”, but with enough difference to make it a little more individual to the women’s team.
You could even read the leaves, inspired by the Amazon rainforest, as an understated political statement given that elements of the Brazilian establishment seem so keen on chopping the thing down. But perhaps that’s a stretch.
Rating: 7
Canada
Canada’s away kit, pictured right (Photo: Nike)
“While the Canada 2023 Away jersey may look simple at first glance,” begins the Nike website, patting itself on the back and inviting you to do the same, “you’ll want to give this kit another look.” Yep, well, we’ve given this one another look and as it turns out it is simple. Very simple. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, especially because white shirts with red trim usually look pretty nice, but even with the background design this is still just a white shirt, isn’t it? Fine, but let’s not make it anything more than it is.
Rating: 7
China
China’s yellow away strip, pictured left (Photo: Nike)
Yeah, same again. We will get to some Nike kits that don’t feel like an afterthought, but it feels like China have been fobbed off here. The home shirt might make it look like the players are sweating profusely before they’ve even started to run, but at least there was some individuality to the design.
Here is simply a yellow shirt, in the template design, with red trim. Maybe less is more. Maybe nobody really cares that half the Nike kits essentially look the same. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But it is worth pointing out that there wasn’t this level of uniformity for the men’s World Cup.
Rating: 5
Colombia
Ah, now this is more like it. The trouble with the blandness of some of the shirts in this round-up is that when something a bit different presents itself, you’re more likely to react positively to it simply because it’s different rather than necessarily because it’s good.
So is this Colombia shirt a striking design, inspired by the colour display of the Cano Cristales river (we recommend you Google it — genuinely amazing), or does it look like someone smashed a lava lamp and spilled the contents over a shirt? It’s unclear at this stage, but a point of difference is welcome either way.
Rating: 8
Costa Rica
Costa Rica’s away kit, modelled by men’s national team player Gerson Torres
Adidas seem to have struck a much better balance for their kits than Nike. Obviously, not everyone will want a more avant-garde design and sometimes simple is good, but rather than just shoving out the same shirt with slightly different colours nine times, it does at least look like a little more thought has gone into theirs.
Take this one: it’s not revolutionary and it’s not going to win any awards for originality, but it’s a straightforward, clean design, with the gold pinstripes nicely contrasted with the white background and black trim. Yes. Great. Strong. Hats off.
Rating: 8
Denmark
This is essentially a mirror of the home kit but with the colours reversed and it does work a little better. It’s still a bit of a hodge-podge of nine different ideas, but it does slightly less resemble a confused art student’s 2am collage than the home shirt.
This is the counter-argument to anyone, like your humble kit reviewer, who complains about over simplicity and uniformity of design. Sometimes different is bad.
Rating: 6
England
(Photo: Naomi Baker – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
It’s slightly tricky not to sound like a disappointed teacher or parent at moments like this but: see, Nike – this is what you’re capable of when you put your mind to it. This is a belter of a design, a shirt that is different to most others, has retro references to warm the heart of us oldies, and the colours are great. Terrific work all round. It makes it even more of a shame that they haven’t done similar for other, dare we say it, less commercially lucrative countries.
Rating: 9
France
(Photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
Again, this is how you do an ostensibly quite basic kit without making it dull. Even if the background design — “inspired by abstract brush strokes”, apparently — is only visible from close up, the “tricolour paint splatter” on the sleeve detail is a great touch and, crucially, for the trim and shorts they have got a more appropriate shade of blue for a France shirt than the home effort.
Rating: 7
Germany
(Photo: Adam Pretty/Getty Images)
Oh! Ja bitte. An absolutely terrific bit of business. Nature seems to be quite a big thing at Adidas this year and they have combined the two facts that a) Germany often have a green away shirt and b) there are loads of forests in Germany to create this super, super shirt. Honestly, it’s really quite difficult to find fault with it. The general pattern is great, the gold trim is great, the collar is great. It’s great. The only shame is that we’ll probably have to wait until the quarter-finals to see it since if all goes to form England will be the first team that plays in white Germany will face.
Rating: 9
Haiti
(Photo: Jung Yeon-je/AFP via Getty Images)
This is pretty decent. The collar is unusual in that it’s a little deeper than most, the lines running slightly diagonally up from the base across the chest are a bit weird, but this is a perfectly respectable way to do a fairly straightforward, uncomplicated white shirt without making it too desperately boring. Maybe it’s easier to pull off that trick with a smaller manufacturer when you haven’t got half the world clamouring for something new, fresh and original.
Rating: 7
Ireland
(Photo: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
Yeah, quite hard to pick too many holes in this one. Clean, crisp, not much messing around, the horizontal pinstripes providing enough detail to avoid it being boring, the collars and sleeves being predominantly green with a touch of orange to make it an identifiably Irish shirt without overdoing it. The sort of shirt which makes you feel guilty for ever saying anything rude about Castore, the manufacturer. Not that we have been rude about them. Apart from one or two times maybe.
Rating: 8
Italy
(Photo: Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)
Adidas proclaim this shirt is a way of “honouring the past, present and future of Italy”. It’s not really explained how, but we assume it’s because there’s a sort of marble design on the main body of the shirt and Italy produce a lot of marble? Either way, this is another classic from Adidas, once again making us forget that Italy with the three stripes is weird and shouldn’t be allowed.
Rating: 8
Jamaica
(Photo: Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)
Hoooooooo boy, yes please and twice yes please. A sensation, terrific, glorious, top drawer, fill in your own superlative. A shirt for the ages, this, like they saw Ajax’s Bob Marley-inspired kit from a few years ago and thought “yeah, that’s nice, but THIS is how you do it”. The great thing about this is that they could have really gone for it with the red, yellow and green colours. Over-egged the pudding. It still would have been nice, but this nice? Probably not. The right balance between subtly and standout design is struck. Great collar, too. Yes. I’ll take all of that you’ve got.
Rating: 9
Japan
Hopefully, someone at Adidas is getting a big raise for these away kits because this is another beaut, a joy, a pearler. The promotional literature says it “captures the colour-shifting vibrancy of the rising sun”, which doesn’t make a huge amount of sense given the colours involved, but that hardly matters when the actual kit looks as good as this. Minor nitpick: we could probably have done without the faint white dashes that criss-cross the shirt because the colours are enough to make this stand out beautifully. But that’s a minor issue really.
Rating: 8
Morocco
A little disappointingly, neither Puma countries — Morocco and Switzerland — have new away kits for this World Cup. It feels a bit weird, but Canada did the same for the men’s World Cup and you can spin it one of two ways: either it’s a missed opportunity given the size that this World Cup is expected to be, or they’re just not rinsing the public with new kits every five minutes, which can be both confusing and expensive. I’m inclined to go with the former, but who knows really. This is a pretty nice shirt, though, with the green and red trim setting off the white background nicely. The stripe down the middle is a bit odd, but otherwise, it’s good… but you still sort of wish they had something new and more specific to them.
Rating: 7
The Netherlands
The Netherlands’ away kit, pictured left (Photo: Nike)
This just looks like a Chelsea shirt, no? Is it the blue? Is it the lion in the logo? Maybe that’s just us. Anyway, Nike say the background design is “a modern all-over print inspired by the country’s iconic tin-glazed earthenware”. So if anyone can decipher what that means, we’d be happy to hear about it. Maybe this is all just being a bit mean because a) the shirt is actually quite good, and b) it’s a bit different to some of the other Nike kits, so that should earn it some credit at least.
Rating: 7
New Zealand
New Zealand’s away kit, pictured right (Photo: Nike)
A reversal of the usual trend where kit designers play it safe with the home shirt but get funky with the away. This is a pretty basic one, just a plain white shirt with a sort of deep turquoise trim, with a hint of New Zealand fern on the sleeve… and… that’s about it. These kit ratings pieces run north of 3,000 words with 32 teams to look at, so as you can tell we don’t usually struggle to find things to say… but… it is quite difficult when… it’s basically just a white shirt.
Rating: 6
Nigeria
Nigeria’s away kit, pictured left (Photo: Nike)
The Nigeria home kit is a bit of an eyesore, almost in a literal sense given that it’s in a green so bright you can see them wearing it in Australia from where this piece is being written in London. The away, on the other hand, is an all-timer. A colour combination of a dark green background along with what looks like Tetris blocks (but are actually apparently “stair-inspired graphic patterns representing the team’s rise on the global stage”) in a subtle variety of red and green colours, which are inspired by Yoruba fabrics. It’s an absolute smash.
Rating: 9
Norway
(Photo: Jaime Reina/AFP via Getty Images)
It’s another Nike shirt about which there is not a huge amount to say. It’s another template. It’s another white shirt. It’s got a bit of colour on the trim and the sleeves. With the blue shorts as well, it looks exactly like a U.S. home kit from about 2002. You wonder if there is actually a benefit to Nike in producing so many shirts that look the same, apart from them not having to actually think about the designs too much.
Rating: 6
Panama
(Photo: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP via Getty Images)
While we celebrated the return of Reebok to the fold when looking at Panama’s home kit, this is just a white version of the same kit, isn’t it? There is something quite nice sometimes about that arrangement — like the two kits are aligned somehow, part of a set, of a piece. But it’s also the case that they can be quite boring, as is true here. Frankly, we wish we were rating that goalkeeper shirt: not sure the daring combo of light turquoise and brilliant pink has been seen on a football kit before.
Rating: 6
Philippines
(Photo: @PilipinasWFNT/Twitter)
Absolutely top-drawer. For all we’ve been ripping the kit designers for lacking imagination with some of these, it must be quite tricky to come up with ideas that don’t look like someone else’s shirt. This one manages it though, a relatively original design that plays with the striped form slightly, with the addition of a terrific blue and yellow combination for the trim. It looks a little like a cross between an Argentina home shirt and a Sweden away one, but in a delightfully original way. Cracking stuff.
Rating: 8
Portugal
Portugal’s away kit, pictured right (Photo: Nike)
Just glorious. The explanation that the pattern “pulls inspiration from street art” is a touch vague to really be taken seriously, but that doesn’t matter when the shirt looks like this. It just works. The slightly off-white background. The reds and the greens and the sort of cream splotches. All of which makes up for the fact it is basically a dressed-up template, with the same collar and sleeve detail as a load of other Nike shirts, but that doesn’t matter when you’ve got something different on the body of the shirt.
Rating: 8
South Africa
Yes! Sometimes you go retro with a nod and a wink to a kit from years gone by, but sometimes you might as well go all out and just directly copy the old kit. Particularly when it’s a belter, as this South Africa shirt shows, inspired by/copied from the shirt that the men’s team wore in the mid-1990s.
Actually, a bit of a confession: this might not actually be the shirt the South Africans wear when there is a clash. It could be this nice enough but fairly bog-standard green shirt. But this is being billed as an ‘alternate’ jersey, which for the moment is quite enough for us, so we’re sticking with rating this one.
Rating: 9
South Korea
South Korea’s away kit, pictured left (Photo: Nike)
Oh Nike. Nike, Nike, Nike, Nike, Nike, Nike, Nike, Nike. Not only is this South Korea away shirt crushingly dull, not only is it basically a template white shirt with some dark blue and red trim, but it’s a crushingly dull template white shirt with some dark blue and red trim that looks the same as the Norway shirt. Come on. I’ve tried not to compare the women’s shirts to the men’s designs, but the Korean women must feel like they have got the rough end of things when you remember what the men got.
Rating: 4
Spain
(Photo: Ulrik Pedersen/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
Muy, muy, muy, muy, muy bueno. This one is inspired by the “coral reefs common to both Southern Europe and Australasia”, it says here, but once again we will ignore the PR fluff and just enjoy the shirt. It occurs that the designers of some of these away shirts, particularly the Adidas ones, may have felt a little freer with their use of bright colours and slightly more “out there” designs with the women’s kits. This might be because they’re not so worried that inhibited and inherently conservative men won’t wear the shirts. It would be a shame if they did think that because this one is a belter.
Rating: 9
Sweden
Nature is good. The outdoors. Mountains, rivers, otters to provide cute internet content — stuff like that. Add to the list “the Sweden away shirt for the 2023 World Cup” because according to Adidas “nature never ceases to inspire”, so therefore this design is “inspired by Sweden’s glacial rivers”. Even if you don’t like nature, you can very much enjoy this shirt, which may look a bit like someone has spilt yoghurt all over it, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. On the contrary: it is good.
Rating: 8
Switzerland
Now, we confess that we’re not 100 per cent sure which Switzerland away kit it is going to be at this tournament because they haven’t got a new away shirt and the team has tweeted out pictures of the players wearing a couple of different designs. But this one seemed to be the one they played their most recent friendly in, so we’ll go with this one, which is a shame because it really is not great.
That big box on the chest with the massive squad number makes it look like a FIFA card and, just to clarify, that is not meant as a good thing.
Rating: 4
USA
The USWNT away kit, pictured right (Photo: Nike)
As mentioned, kit designers tend to play it safe with the home shirt and go a little more avant-garde with the away, but that has been reversed in the case of the USWNT. And, frankly, that’s a bit of a shame. Or maybe it’s a good thing because we’ll see more of the good ones, and also because this change kit is a bit boring really, certainly in comparison to the abstract impressionism-inspired, spatter pattern of the home shirt. This one is just a template with a few patches of red and while that’s sort of… fine, you might think Nike would be a little more imaginative for what is presumably their biggest market at this tournament.
Rating: 6
Vietnam
(Photo: Simon Holmes/Getty Images)
The nice thing about this shirt* is it would be exactly what you would come up with if someone asked you to design a kit for a communist country. A hammer and sickle might be a bit on the nose, but, otherwise, this is spot on.
A light-hearted round-up of World Cup kits probably isn’t the best place to discuss whether that’s a good or bad thing, but on a purely aesthetic level, it’s a pretty natty look. That collar looks a bit too :starchy” and not really sure what’s going on with the background pattern, but otherwise, this is solid.
If your taste is a little livelier, have a bang on the goalkeeper shirt. Wowsers.
*Vietnam men and women have the same away strip
Rating: 7
Zambia
(Photo: Roland Krivec/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
This is exactly the same design as the home shirt, only in a deeper green and with a variety of colours on the chevrons down the left side. But somehow this works much better. Is it because the green is nicer than the burnt orange of the home kit? Is it that it could be a sort of ersatz Hummel design? Is it because Rachael Kundananji is doing a much cooler pose in this picture than Barbra Banda for the other? Tricky to say at this stage.
Rating: 7
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)
