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

The thing with football shirts is that they’re… well… football shirts.
They’re not supposed to include the kind of patterns blokes would have on a shirt they might wear unbuttoned down to the naval while propping up a beach bar in Greece.
Manufacturers Puma tell us this is “a creation that celebrates the pride and passion of Icelandic football. This jersey embodies the spirit of the national team and provides players and fans with the look and performance on the pitch”.
That sounds like a great shirt, so it’s a pity they’re wearing this one.

A marketing-related gripe before we get to the design: why is Nike promoting this shirt by pairing it with what looks like a high-school hockey skirt? Footballers don’t wear skirts, so this just feels like an irritating attempt to ‘feminise’ a football kit, to emphasise that this is something women can wear. You know how it’s clear that a woman can wear a football shirt? Because they do, all the time. Anyway, to the actual shirt: it sort of looks like a cheap knock-off of a football shirt, the sort of thing you might find on a street stall for a suspiciously low price. According to Nike, the “shifts in colour” are used to “honour the pioneers of the national team playing through the ’70s and ’80s”. Hmmm. It still looks rubbish.

The pattern on this shirt does look a little like a chintzy tablecloth reimagined as a football shirt, a slightly random design just included to make a plain red shirt look more interesting. But when you look closer, you can see it’s actually repeated examples of the Swiss national flag – which, as the old gag goes, is a big plus – and the Swiss national logo. But ultimately it does still look a little like a chintzy tablecloth reimagined as a football shirt.

Between the intrusive pattern that belongs on a set of velvet curtains rather than a football shirt, the shiny finish that makes it look like it has been ironed too many times and the intrusive trim in the bottom corner, there is not a great deal to commend this one.
Even the collar looks like they couldn’t decide between a classic v-neck and something more elaborate, so they have gone for a bit of both.

The blurb declares that this shirt is “inspired by the bold simplicity of Dutch design”, but the closer you look, there’s actually quite a lot going on with this. From a distance, it looks like a fairly plain orange, traditional shirt, but then there’s the red, white and blue trim and collar, the crest being in the centre but the Nike swoosh on the right giving it an odd lopsided feel, and then the dotted background pattern. That is “honouring the icons of modern art”, apparently, but Nike does not specify which icons, so if anyone who knows more about art than me could enlighten us on that one…

It still takes some getting used to that Italy are an Adidas team now. It shouldn’t feel so unnatural, but it does, particularly when you see a shirt like the Iceland one and think ‘this should be the Italy shirt’. Which isn’t to say it’s necessarily amazing, but it just looks more like an Italy shirt than the actual Italy shirt. The strange patterns on the front of the shirt look a little like raindrops, but I do enjoy that the Adidas stripes are in the Italy flag’s colours. Nice touch.

In isolation, this is perfectly nice, but it is always quite disappointing when a shirt is quite so ‘template-y’. It happens quite a bit when a manufacturer has some really big countries on their books, so roll out the creativity a bit more for them, but also have a few smaller/less commercially-attractive teams to take care of. To prove the point, Poland are absent from the section of their website that gathers all of their big-ticket clients together (Barcelona, PSG, France, England, USA), suggesting this was something of an afterthought.

Those of us old enough to have watched TVs that had set-top aerials, rather than just receiving the signal via a digital box, will be familiar with the design on this France shirt. When the signal was just a little off, you’d get what they called ‘snow’ on the picture, which is to say little dots all over the place that obscured the image on the screen. It was really annoying, but aesthetically quite cool – as with this shirt. The problem is they’ve chosen a much darker blue than is traditional for France shirts. It works, it looks OK, but this could be anyone’s shirt. It’s not identifiably a France shirt, which means it loses some appeal.

You know if you go for dinner somewhere relatively fancy/thinks it’s fancy and it’s clearly a very nicely-cooked bit of lamb or cabbage or whatever, but the chef has decided that it just looks a little bit plain so has drizzled a sauce or reduction or ‘jus’ over it? Yeah, that’s what this Portugal shirt looks like to me, with those dotted graphics running diagonally over it. Otherwise, it’s pretty good, although you do wonder when the old ‘contrasting coloured panels underneath the armpits to provide a bit of variety’ trope is going to run out of steam a bit, because it does feel like a bit of an easy go-to.

The good thing about Denmark shirts is that even though they are in a relatively ubiquitous red and white colour scheme, they have a pretty distinctive look. Remove the badge and there’s a good chance you’d say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a Denmark shirt.” And so it is here: in truth, it’s a fairly unimaginative shirt – in fact, it almost feels like two unimaginative shirts, one draped over the shoulders of another with the plain red atop the shaded stripes – but if it’s a choice between variety and a clear visual identity, you’d take the latter every time.

There is lots to like about this simple Adidas design, despite the typically odd official description, which claims it was “inspired by the beauty of Spain’s national flower and the rhythmical movement of ocean waves”.
It is simple, classic and clean, so it really should be great. There is just one thing wrong and I cannot look past it, otherwise this might be higher on this list.
That FIFA badge in the centre, which Spain sport as World Cup holders, looks like an iron-on transfer last seen on 1990s school PE kits and just goes to prove there is almost nothing the world governing body cannot spoil.

This is an extremely similar design to a few of Nike’s kits at last summer’s men’s Euros (the Netherlands in particular), which is a tiny bit disappointing given most designers tend to show a little more variety and imagination for their women’s kits these days. But there are enough variations to still make this a pretty nice number, from the v-neck collar to the sleeve detail, which, and you’ll like this, is apparently inspired by Norway’s ‘iconic knitwear pattern’. But of course.

Ah, now this is how you use a template without it being too generic or unimaginative. The basic design itself is clearly strong, otherwise it wouldn’t be a template, but the key is how you include the variation, and this is done superbly here. The line from just beneath the ribs that continues onto the shorts is a reference to that brilliant Wales kit of the 1970s, with similarly-coloured stripes down the side. Maybe it would have been better had the Adidas stripes on the shoulders also been in those colours, but perhaps that would’ve been too much.

This is great. There’s real originality to the idea of a single thick bar down the middle into which you essentially pour all of the detail and variety of the shirt. It works from a distance, the yellow trim on the edge of the bar adding another touch of variety, and also close up when you look at the fairly intricate pattern. According to the Nike website, this design is a “trace of the past, a voice of the future”, and that “by wearing this, you’re not just wearing a jersey – you’re wearing a hand-drawn story about being Finnish”. Which would be easy to mock, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong if you did so, but there’s nothing wrong with a country’s football shirt being an expression of their national identity if it’s a positive expression like this one.

Manufacturers Adidas claim this classic design is “inspired by the brilliant skies of Midsummer’s Day”, which frankly is a phrase that belongs in a commercial for fabric softener instead of a launch press release for a football kit. And apparently “a woven team badge on the chest puts your passionate football fandom under the spotlight”. No, we have absolutely no idea what that means, either.
But when a shirt is this good, it’s hard to stay cynical for long. Simple, clean and classic Sweden.

Another Adidas classic and definitive proof that the best approach to football shirts is “if it ain’t broken, don’t try to fix it”.
Simple is best, and in the case of a Germany kit, that means plain, with no need to incorporate the colours of the nation’s flag or any overly intrusive trim.
Pretty much all boxes have been ticked here, which means we can even overlook the pretentious sales pitch from Adidas, which tells us that “this football jersey has subtle pinstripes and a tonal eagle engineered into its soft jacquard fabric”.
We’ve checked – well, we’ve Googled – because, really, who knows what ‘tonal eagle’ means? It turns out it is the logo of a different clothing brand, Lyle and Scott.
But apart from subliminally advertising a potential rival, Adidas have nailed it.