ranking various international football kits

December 08, 2025

I’m going to Toronto next year to watch some World Cup games with my dad. We booked the trip a while ago, before the draw, so we had no idea who would be playing. The point is to just see a game or two as a sort of Bucket List thing, and we were hoping for as few “big games” as possible to maximise our chances of getting cheap(ish) tickets. Luckily we faded England (who had a 50/50 shot of playing in Toronto) and our teams are: Germany, Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Panama. There will also be one play-in team which we’re hoping ends up being Iraq (the coolest of the possible outcomes).

So now I’m browsing kits because well I have to show support to my adoptive team. Design-wise, here is a top five.

Panama 2017 Home
I have a soft spot for red/blue clash. It reminds me of building a disgusting-looking Lego house as a kid. There’s just something very striking about this and it would be perfect were it not for the totally superfluous red/white stripes which do the opposite of tying the garment together. It looks like the penultimate version of the correct in which the striped sections would just be red and we would have a perfect Optimus Prime thing going on.

Senegal 2017 Home
This is self-explanatory. There is a large cat style predator lunging across the front of the thing. It isn’t often that kit designs do something representational like this; usually the “brave” designs are just pink or something like that. I also think by wearing this I will get “cool points” and respect from the Senegal fans because this is the kit from the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations which basically nobody outside of Africa watches.

Ghana 2022 Away
Puma did a frame on all the African away kits for 2022 which was a super cool idea. The Ghana top is my favourite out of the lot (Egypt’s is also pretty good), just because I am a baby and the colours are very striking and the whole thing pops. So often football kit designs are thrown off by an errant element (association logo, team logo, manufacturer’s logo, etc) but here they’re all unified and feel justified. The central star absolutely kills here.

Germany 2020 Away
Another thing I am a sucker for, unfortunately. Despite being in my 30s I am still an all-black skinny-jeans-and-tee combo guy and this top speaks to me like a Blood Incantation tour shirt. For non football enjoyers basically every team ever does a blackout kit at some point because dummies like me love them.

Germany 2026 Home
Call it recency bias but this is the kit of the world cup. Argentina, Brazil and Mexico are iconic as always but of the teams that substantially change their designs year-on-year you just can’t get away from this one. Very clean and powerful and identifiable. It’s always difficult to incorporate a flag because they look a tad forced and silly, but somehow Germany always does it well despite having an incredibly dog-ass flag as far as flags go.