Ranking the best and worst Premier League away kits: Graffiti, Lynx deodorant and ‘night forest’

You know how you’re supposed to wash black jeans inside out, so they don’t fade badly and essentially end up looking grey? This is sort of what this shirt looks like.

Well, that and a Lynx deodorant gift set that a well-meaning elderly relative gives you at Christmas.

It also feels like Arsenal have tried to go for a loose version of that Bob Marley-inspired Ajax away kit from a few years ago that everyone lost their minds over. The difference being: that was good.

Yeah, not a fan of this one. 

There’s always at least one kit in these Premier League round-ups that looks like a slightly crap yoga outfit, so congratulations to Nottingham Forest for taking that title this season.

It doesn’t work, does it? Garish pink trim on a dark blue shirt, with a seemingly quite random diagonal pattern on the body.

I guess it could be worse — such as if they flipped the colours around, but at least that would be bold and brash and would make you easy to spot in a crowd.

As it is… nope.

”Bow Bells are ringing, for the claret and blue,” announces the West Ham website, when introducing this shirt. ”Tradition has it that to be a true cockney you must be born within the sound of the Bow Bells.”

Now, looking at this you might wonder what relevance that has to what seems to be a pretty boring, plain black shirt. ”There is no relevance,” you might say. But wait! If you look at the back, right at the top, at the nape of the neck, there is a small bell, about the size of a 50p piece, near the collar. It all makes perfect sense now!

Still, you probably have to make something up completely to make this very, very, very dull shirt sound even slightly appealing. 

It says here that this Everton away shirt is ”inspired by the famous nights that have played out under the glow of Goodison’s fabled floodlights.”

Which is… a nice idea. But they don’t seem to have gone any further with that idea than producing a black shirt (because nights are dark) with yellow trim (because floodlights are yellow). I dunno, maybe I’m being a bit sniffy, but it does feel a bit half-baked.

It also ”boasts” a ”contemporary geometric pattern” which is apparently supposed to ”pay homage” to their final season at Goodison Park. But it’s not clear how, and just reads like a fairly cynical attempt to persuade people to buy the shirt, like one of those commemorative plates you see advertised on daytime TV to ”pay homage” to the Queen.

The bold yellow offset with the navy blue trim is a good start, but here’s another shirt with a seemingly random pattern that doesn’t really have a particular explanation.

Actually, here’s the explanation from the Southampton website, which seems to have been written by a children’s TV presenter: ”Stand out with the Southampton FC away kit, featuring a striking dazzle graphic on the front of the shirt and sleeves in fizzy yellow and yellow sizzle.”

Does that mean anything? Is it completely lost on me, a middle-aged man? Is it just nonsense? Does it make the kit any better?

The answer to all of the above is, I suspect, no.

This looks like the curtains in a doctor’s waiting room. Which possibly isn’t an entirely bad thing, given that those colours are presumably chosen to make you feel relaxed while you’re waiting to hear whether your rash or warts are something to be worried about.

But is it the sort of thing you want in a football shirt? Granted, we’re probably past the ‘intimidating our opponents with our fearsome appearance’ stage now, but equally do you want your opponents to associate your kit with copies of Now magazine and the faint whiff of disinfectant?

Maybe you do. Maybe this is a cunning psychological experiment. Maybe I’ve just drawn stupid conclusions from a snap judgment. 

A theme among the kits at the Africa Cup of Nations earlier this year was ”massive animals as a background design on the main body of the shirt”; eagles, lions, elephants, take your pick. Macron were obviously watching that with interest, as they’ve gone with that motif for this Wolves shirt.

It is all a bit on the nose, to the point where it looks like the wolf is eating the sponsor’s logo, which you would think is probably an accident, but you never know: perhaps it’s a subtle comment on the relationship between football and gambling advertising.

Or perhaps not.

Interesting. Really don’t know what to make of this. I don’t really think it looks like a football kit, but then again I don’t really know what it does look like.

Maybe one of those odd rugby league kits worn by a team from Spain who play in the English league for some reason? Maybe someone who was born in 1992 but has tried to draw the Aston Villa kit from 1992 from memory? This isn’t to say it’s not nice, per se, just… a bit confusing.

That said, the background pattern is basically a collage of some of the flags that fans at Portman Road have waved down over the years, which is a pretty nice touch.

Still, a bit confusing. 

Fine? I guess? Liverpool have gone for a black away kit quite a few times in the past, and — for me — it has never quite worked. Actually, officially the main colour is called ”night forest”, which sounds so much more sinister than merely ”black”.

The thing with black football shirts is they generally need a really bold trim colour to make them work, but here they have gone for ‘teal’ and a bit of white, which doesn’t really do the job.

A shame, because the home shirt is an absolute belter, whereas this is just a bit… dull? OK? Fine? I guess. 

Sometimes you read the blurb that comes with football kits and think “Well, this is absolute balderdash, but at least someone, somewhere, has put a bit of effort and imagination into it.”

For this Manchester United away kit, the best that they can offer is that it ”nods to football culture”. How? Not sure. Is it the repeated capital M design? Is it the collar? Is it the blue, which if you’re generous could be a nod to the colour United wore when they won the 1968 European Cup? Does any of this matter?

Well, no, particularly as this is a pretty nice shirt, nothing too complicated but equally not too boring either. But if you spot the ‘culture’ element, do let us know. 

It’s a bleak moment for anyone who suffers from any vague existential woes to see what constitutes ‘retro’ these days. Bad news comes in the form of this Brighton away shirt, which seems to be a reverential tribute to their away shirt from… 2014.

Hoo boy. Maybe that’s just a coincidence, but the blue pinstripes on the yellow background design does look a little like their kit from a decade ago. And it looks pretty nice, the yellow shade being bold enough to stand out but not so bright and garish to be, well, bright and garish.

It would be a slight stretch to call this shirt ‘good’, given that the main colour seems to be a shade called ‘white sock left in a red wash’, and it’s basically the same design as the much cleaner England shirt.

But in comparison to the psychedelic horror show that is the Chelsea home shirt, this is basically an elegant and perfectly-cut Gucci suit.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh: the blue and orange combination trim looks really nice… you just wish that the main body was in a slightly less murky colour.

Another for the ‘on the nose fearsome animal splashed across the shirt’ genre, and this time it’s Crystal Palace, so it’s an eagle.

It’s tricky to say whether this is smart and clever and a nice nod to the club’s heritage, or the sort of shirt that a child might design. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It’s not quite as renegade as the ‘I don’t know why I like this but oddly I do’ home shirt, but it’s a more conventionally strong design, with the classic Palace away colours of yellow with blue and red trim working rather nicely.

The final boss of the ‘is it good, or is it just retro from an impressionable period of your life and thus gives you a warm feeling of familiarity from your youth’ genre.

This is, for the youngsters among you, a tribute to the away shirt City wore in 1999, when they were in — get this — League One and they won the play-off final on penalties, and they were wearing this fluorescent yellow and dark blue striped number.

This version of City paying tribute to that version of City is a bit weird, like Apple launching a marketing campaign that features a typewriter, but nostalgia is a powerful thing, even if people aren’t old enough to actually remember the thing they’re being nostalgic about.

Retro design is a strange thing. Particularly in 2024, when a lot of the retro designs are referring to designs which themselves were retro at the time.

Take this Spurs away shirt, which Nike announced was ”throwing it back to the 80s and 90s” — specifically, their away shirt from about 1983 to 1987, which in turn was referenced in that third shirt with ‘SPURS’ written in broken text across the chest in 1994.

Either way, this is a lovely little number even without the nod to the past, although they do lose a few marks for the lopsided club badge/Nike logo placement. 

Smashing.

Clean and simple, which could easily be boring but there seems to have been a conscious choice by Adidas to introduce themselves to Aston Villa by keeping things relatively uncomplicated, and it works a treat.

It’s like they took a look at last season’s away shirt, designed by Castore, which was also white with a light blue and claret trim, and said “no, you adorable yet simple young children… this is how you do it.”

Real big boy stuff, and a glorious start to the Villa-Adidas marriage after some frankly ropey years with other designers.

Whoa.

Actually, you know what — yes. This is good.

If you think this looks like the graffiti on the wall outside a railway station, then Leicester and Adidas are going to be very happy with you, because that’s exactly the inspiration. The blurb for the shirt says that the design celebrates ”the culture and community of our city… inspired by the street art and murals of Leicester.”

There is a very strong whiff of that irritating thing that big companies or organisations do where they co-opt organic culture and immediately make it about 90 per cent less fun, but you sometimes have to remember that this is just a football shirt, and maybe it doesn’t always need pseudo-anthropological analysis.

A superb summer for Brentford: firstly, they continue their policy of only releasing one kit every year, meaning their home shirt is the same as last season, and then they release this lovely bit of business as their away kit.

Pink shirts have become a bit of a staple in recent years, starting with that Juventus number from a few years ago, and obviously now fully established thanks to David Beckham, Lionel Messi and Inter Miami.

At the same time, the colour is enough of a novelty that you don’t have to do anything too elaborate with the design, hence this simple approach looking very smart and clean.

Lovely work all round.

This is great. It’s very basic, but it’s a red and black striped shirt with the stripes in perfect proportion, an unfussy trim, a nice V-neck collar and just the right amount of white to make things pop.

But that’s not the only reason it’s great: this is essentially the same away shirt that Fulham wore in the 2007-08 season — otherwise known as the ‘Great Escape’ under Roy Hodgson when they were mathematically relegated at half-time of their third-last game, but implausibly went on to survive.

And why is that good for the neutral? Because it’s a visual prompt for everyone’s favourite game: “Let’s just sit around and name players from the past”.

Diomansy Kamara! David Healy! Brede Hangeland! Aaron Hughes! Clint Dempsey!

Oh, I’m in heaven.

Another one for the nostalgia files, and Newcastle have gone absolutely all-in with this one, and while it’s the most inevitable kit design of the summer after their return to Adidas after all these years, that doesn’t make it any less special.

If you’re too young to remember the Newcastle side of Alan Shearer, David Ginola, Les Ferdinand and Philippe Albert, find someone over the age of about 35, show them a picture of this shirt and make your judgment based on their reaction, which if they’re anything like me will be whimsical reverie.

A delight, a marvel, wonderful, consider me thoroughly sports washed.