The Worst Football Kits of All Time

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Worn by the likes of Sir Bobby Charlton CBE, Bobby Moore OBE and Sir Geoff Hurst MBE during the 1966 Wembley final, the iconic strip remains popular more than 50 years later. When the South Korean Football Federation released an updated badge with a sleek new tiger logo, they needed a kit to match. Or so they thought -- those of us who witnessed Hull City's 1992 kit (No. 33) know that's a terrible idea. What the Korean team got in the end was a shirt that looked like something "101 Dalmatians" villain Cruella de Vil would wear. The kit was released earlier this year and hasn't been worn yet.

The Mutiny, led by Colombia's star of USA '94, Carlos Valderrama, won the Eastern Conference and MLS Supporters' Shield in their first season, but they never reached those heights again and eventually dissolved in 2002. This kit is so glorious that there aren’t even any good images on Google of the original, so I’ve had to settle for the Score Draw replica with a missing Le Coq Sportif logo. It was worn firstly in the 1983/84 season, in which Everton won the FA Cup over Watford, ending their 14-year trophy drought and marking the beginning of the Club’s most successful era, in which they won 8 major honors in the next 4 years. The 1984/85 Everton team was unquestionably the greatest in our club’s history, winning the First Division over Liverpool by a monumental 13 point margin, along with winning the European Cup Winner’s Cup, and the Charity Shield, as well as reaching the FA Cup Final which we lost 1-0 to Manchester United in extra time. Worn by the likes of Sheedy, Sharp, and Gray, this kit was not only donned by the best of Everton Football Club but is also an absolutely worldie of a kit all on its own. I’m sure many of you are surprised that I haven’t put this #1, and understandably so. Legendary is an understatement. Neville's United teammate Lee Sharpe was not so sure it was down to the kit, telling the Guardian: "I'm not sure if any of the players mentioned the kit. Personally I felt that we were playing really poorly, and that we couldn't really blame anything or anyone but ourselves."If we have learnt nothing else from Timmy Mallet, it's that polka dots should only ever be seen on itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikinis. Never, under any circumstances, on the field of play. However the adidas strip also made the top 20 best shirts - and is so popular it inspired the Gunners’ yellow away shirt for next season.

Remarkably given the shelf-life of today’s kits, it was worn by the Catalans from 1980 to 1989 with notable players from that era including Diego Maradona, Gary Lineker and Bernd Schuster. Ever heard the phrase "if you want something done well, you have to do it yourself"? That's what German gambling company Faber Lotto-Service did with local team Bochum in 1997. Not satisfied with Reebok's and Reusch's timid designs, and with zero experience of making kits, Faber posed as a sports manufacturer and created their own colourful shirts for Bochum's first foray into the UEFA Cup. The fans absolutely hated Faber's rainbow logo, and the collective anger when the shirt was unveiled in front of them was audible. In our 101 Best Kits ranking, we mentioned Admiral, the small Leicestershire-based kit manufacturers who went from making underwear in the 1900s to England's World Cup kit in 1982. Admiral really changed the game for football jerseys, introducing the idea of mass-produced replica shirts for fans and using unusual designs. Unfortunately, they didn't always get it right, and this was probably their worst. History credits much-loved Coventry kit man Jimmy Herbert as the brains behind this chocolate-coloured kit. United switched to their blue-and-white away kit at the break and "won" the second half 1-0, but the grey kit was binned immediately with a final record of no wins from four games played.The kit was originally manufactured by UK sportswear brand Ribero, which had the misfortune of going into receivership halfway through the 1993-94 season, which led Mitre to literally sew its logo over the top for the latter half of the campaign. Why anybody else would want to take credit for Ribero's risible design is another matter entirely. 8. Manchester City: third, 2019-20 (Puma) Visionhaus When the Guggenheim Museum opened in 1997, Bilbao became the home for Spanish arts. Well, 7 years later, Athletico took this a little too far by celebrating their centenary with a kit designed by Basque artist Dario Urzay. Ketchup on a shirt, yes. In the summer of 1995, Chelsea signing Ruud Gullit posed in his new club's home jersey worn over a long-sleeve office shirt, perhaps in an attempt to convince people that "doing a Gullit" (wearing football shirts over work attire) was the new "doing a Cantona" (turning up your collar). Funnily enough, it didn't catch on, and neither did this horrid grey-and-orange away shirt, which Gullit wore on his Chelsea debut in a preseason friendly at Gillingham.

In the 1990s, Stoke City must have been anxious to ensure that everyone who saw them play would remember them. Why else would manufacturers Asics emblazon "STOKE" in giant, shadowed font akin to an early Windows screensaver right across the torso? Unfortunately, the lettering was so massive that it was hard to see the whole word all at once. Alas, the same could not be said about the alternative strips of the same period, with a number of dreary blue-and-white away kits falling by the wayside in terms of cultural cachet. The nadir definitely came in 1996-97 (the year Boro were relegated from the Premier League despite reaching both domestic cup finals) when Errea went all out with a boxy white shirt besmirched by an equally oversized "crisscross" graphic. This is a uniform that pays homage to the club's early days -- in particular the fifth Earl of Rosebery, Archibald Primrose, who was British prime minister from March 1894 to June 1895 as well as the first Earl of Midlothian and honorary president of both the Scottish Football Association and Hearts. His horse racing colours of rose and primrose yellow were adopted by the Scotland national team in 1900, so Hearts decided to do the same in 2016. But there's a big reason football kits don't look like this anymore: people didn't really take football that seriously. The goals didn't even have crossbars, for goodness' sake. Pink and purple is a bold look that few would try to pull off. The club had previously dabbled with the colour combination as an away strip in 2014 but decided to really up the stakes for the Singapore Cup two years ago by having manufacturers Lotto slap the pink in the middle of the purple and adding a floral trim. They reached the final of the competition that year, presumably because the kit distracted their opponents.We just don't know what's going on here. There's probably an explanation for why a bowler-hatted, moustached man is on the front of this kit, but even if there is, it really doesn't justify it. Maybe he's scoring it out of 10? Take about 4 points away and you'd be on the money. Nike’s 2002 Brazil home strip is up there with the best as well - along with two of the US sport brand’s Arsenal shirts – the 1995/96 blue away and the 2005/06 redcurrant home shirts. But 101 of them? Come on, no one deserves that, no matter how much you love to loathe them. So we've narrowed it down to 39, which is right on the limit of how many abhorrent designs we can handle in one place.