Women’s Euro 2025: Ranking the best and worst of the away kits

Yellow and purple is a pretty bold choice of contrasting colours. Is it a football shirt or an ice-lolly wrapper? Why not both? Adidas has clearly decided to go all-out with its away kits for this European Championship, to experiment a little, and while many of the bold designs you will read about on this list are gambles that have paid off, this isn’t one of them. The design is fine, but the colours just don’t work with each other.

The Finland home shirt is a lesson in how to artfully introduce smart and intricate design into a football shirt. This is… not. It’s partly the same pattern, but rather than subtly incorporating it into a a slim panel down the middle, it’s enlarged and expanded across the whole body of the shirt. Which essentially makes it look like an owl who is determined to offer some sort of ritual sacrifice to whatever deranged god wants it. Genuinely unsettling. The owl’s eyes follow you around the room. The horror.

This resembles a version of the Portugal away shirt, without a real sense of conviction. It’s like they’re twins and one is dynamic, interesting and charismatic, while the other is safe, bland, and talks about mortgage rates a lot. It doesn’t look bad in itself, but next to Portugal’s, it’s all a bit ‘look what you could’ve won’. The Adidas blurb claims this shirt features ‘bold graphics’, but can something be bold if you can’t really see it?

Here we have essentially the same design as the 2024 home shirt, just in this pleasant light blue. It’s… well, it’s fine, isn’t it? Not a huge amount more to get excited about. The colour is fine. The collar is fine. The little Netherlands-flag coloured detail on the collar is fine. The cut is fine. It’s… well, it’s fine. If you’re under the age of 25, replace every instance of the word ‘fine’ in the past few lines with ‘mid’, if that helps at all.

It looks OK but feels slightly lazy, or at least a bit ‘off the peg’ given the originality of some of the other away shirts Adidas has produced for this tournament. It does look most definitely like a Sweden shirt, and there is a bit of variation with the blended colours and wave effects near the shoulders, but this is essentially just an Adidas template with traditional Swedish away shirt colours. Will anyone really care? Maybe not, but this just feels quite safe.

Is this kit supposed to look so cold? Is it a tribute to the Swiss Alps? Are the swirls supposed to be a topographical reference, a nod to how those Alps might be displayed on a map? Actually, yes, that’s all probably right, isn’t it? I can’t find any Puma marketing information, so it’s difficult to ascertain for sure, but that’s almost certainly it. Anyway, enough of all that: is this shirt any good? Well, yeah, sort of, it’s fine. It does just look a bit… cold.

Football shirts aren’t necessarily supposed to make you relaxed, the sportswear equivalent of some scented candles and an album of panpipe music, but there’s something extremely soothing about this one. Does it look like a T-shirt that someone who works in a shop selling bath salts would wear? Yes. Does it also make you want to buy some of those bath salts, fill up the tub, pour yourself a glass of wine and forget all of your worries? Also yes.

There’s often something quite nice about home and away kits that mirror each other, the same design but with the colours reversed. It’s like they’re ‘of a piece’, that someone has actually thought about how they might relate to each other, and in Denmark’s case help create a consistent visual identity. This, like the home shirt, is a pretty basic design, and is perhaps made even more basic-looking due to it being white and red rather than red and white, but it still works.

Shiny! Part kit, part disco ball, this is the shirt you’d wear if you were trying to get into Studio 54 but had to come straight from your Thursday night five-a-side game. This is good, but there is a slight element of novelty to it, like someone at Nike had a design meeting and asked those present to come up with the wackiest idea they could think of. Does it have anything much to do with Poland? Probably not. Does that matter? Probably not.

The great debate that has already raged for centuries and surely will for centuries more: do pastel colours belong on a football shirt? The answer to which is, of course: maybe! Nike reports that this shirt’s ‘geometric lines celebrate the country’s architecture, while the cool purples and icy turquoise evoke morning light over snowy landscapes’. Which does make it sound a bit like this shirt should come with a dream catcher, but that does it something of a disservice. At the very least it’s different, and lord knows there are enough unimaginative designs around that you shouldn’t dismiss something just because it’s different.

Here’s more sports company spiel that I am swallowing whole: the design on this Italy shirt is, we are reliably informed by Adidas, ‘inspired by 15th century Italian Renaissance art’, and I believe them. Because if we can’t believe words cynically placed next to each other in an attempt to persuade us to part with our money, then what can we believe? It’s also, setting apart the promotional bumf, just a nice shirt to look at, the pale green offset rather nicely by the bold red trim and details.

And some more marketing bull**** that I’m actually prepared to believe: according to the Adidas blurb, the design on this Germany away shirt is ‘inspired by the nation’s vibrant street art scene’ — which actually makes sense! There IS a vibrant street art scene in Germany. These designs DO sort of look like they could belong in that. The pattern does sort of look like interlocking fingers, but if you can put that out of your mind, then this all looks really good.

The black football shirt is always a difficult one to pull off. You can easily end up with a glorified goalkeeper’s jersey, and nobody wants that. The way to do it is with judicious use of strong contrast colours, and that’s exactly what Nike has done here, with those pinks, blues and reds underneath the armpits and down the side of the shorts. Much, much better than the England home shirt. Which, admittedly, is the most damning of faint praise.

Now, this is really smart. To design a shirt with this shade of green with those sort of graphics and not make it overwhelming and ‘too much’ requires a delicate touch. And whoever is in charge of these things at Puma seemingly has that delicate touch, because if the green was a slightly brighter shade, or the overlaying graphics slightly bolder, then it wouldn’t have worked: too gaudy, too bright, too much. But as it is, they’ve got things just right.

This is really, really great. Nike is on the verge of being too clever for its own good with the slanted, asymmetric collar, but it falls down just on the right side of stylish. It helps that the colour scheme works perfectly, the red and blue trim paired splendidly with a sort of cream/off white. The main body colour is key when it comes to the use of a sort of salmon for the crest and Nike swoosh, which could be quite irritating, but it fits with the cream/off white in a way that it probably wouldn’t with a traditional white. Tremendous.

Fantastic. A genuinely magnificent piece of kit design. Design generally, really. It’s different, distinctive, original… and other words that essentially mean the same thing. The patterns fit together really well, the colours complement each other perfectly, the black Adidas stripes and logo offset it all nicely. If there’s one gripe, it’s that it doesn’t necessarily look like a Spain shirt — maybe more of a deconstructed Argentina shirt — but that’s nit-picking really.