England home kits ranked: New instant classic featuring ‘playful’ flag straight in at No.1
Nike have unveiled England’s new kits for Euro 2024. We’re still on the fence about the away kit, which has some nice bits but is also not red like it should be and from the pictures we’ve seen maybe not even blue, the only other even vaguely acceptable choice? Controversial.
Anyway. The home kit is a spectacular return to form with lovely details on the sleeves and – very importantly – all the right colours in all the right places and proportions. That’s right, isn’t it?
So what we’ve done is rank it alongside all England’s major tournament home shirts of the 21st century, because what else are we supposed to do with our time in an international break where no Premier League manager is about to get sacked?
11) Euro 2016
The sleeves are blue. Why are the sleeves blue? WHY ARE THE SLEEVES BLUE, NIKE? HMM? England’s home shirt should not have blue sleeves.
It’s a shame, because this was a genuinely decent Nike template and it could have been a huge success if they’d just knocked that ‘ice blue’ on the head. The darker blue that makes up the rest of the trim is arguably a bit too royal and not sufficiently navy, but it’s not a disgrace. The lightness of the blue on those sleeves is a massive giveaway that Nike knew what they were doing was wrong. Had they the courage of their convictions, this would have had much darker sleeves.
It would have been a worse shirt, but at least there’d have been an honesty to it. “We think blue sleeves are good, so we’ve given you properly blue sleeves.” Not this ‘ice blue’ nonsense. Fitting really that the ice blue got knocked out by Iceland, when you think about it.
The problem of the sleeves was also exaggerated by players wearing white baselayers under the blue sleeves, which looked a right mess. It’s no wonder England made such a mess of the tournament, frankly.
Anyway, what really annoys us not that this shirt is rubbish – sometimes shirts just are rubbish and that’s fine. What annoys us is how close this was to being good. There were options. The accompanying away kit in which the body and sleeves were two different shades of red showed one way; if Nike were absolutely adamant the sleeves couldn’t be exactly the same as the rest of the shirt they could have gone with an off-white that might have saved it?
Euro 2016: The incredibly vital statistics
10) Euro 2012
A shirt that can only be explained by some absolute prick at Umbro going “What if the 2010 shirt, which managed to be both unacceptably plain and have too much red, was in fact even plainer but somehow even redder?” and instead of getting punched in the face they got promoted.
The all-red badge still makes us feel violently sick all these years later. Just an absolute pig’s arse of a thing, this. The worst of all worlds. Offensive for both its abject laziness and for the wrongheadedness of what tinkering they did bother with. Umbro will always be associated with some absolutely wonderful England kits, and it’s a genuine source of lasting national shame that the final two they produced for major men’s tournaments were completely sh*t.
9) World Cup 2010
Umbro were basically checking out by this point. This represented a low point of the lazy white-polo-shirt-with-an-England-badge-that’ll-be-60-quid-please era, and it was made worse by the Umbro badge being in red rather than blue. Red is a very correct accent colour on an England shirt, but it is the third not second accent colour behind navy blue. It may also be the players’ names and numbers, but again, we really do need to see some navy before we’re going to allow that.
The very similar shirt Umbro released for the Women’s World Cup the following year was no less lazy, but did have the Umbro badge in blue and looked far better for this minor but vital tweak.
8) World Cup 2022
There is a strong case that sky blue belongs only on an England goalkeeper or third shirt, but there is precedent from Euro 96 and we’re happy to allow it. But only if used judiciously and carefully. Had that light blue been restricted to the sleeve cuffs, all would be well. Even the little flashes at the hem were okay.
But those shoulders are an absolute nightmare. Far too much blue and far too many blues. All of the blues are here.
England shirts can – nay, must – have blue detailing but they absolutely must not have blue sleeves or shoulders and it’s genuinely staggering that Nike apparently needed to be told this again after the 2016 debacle.
7) World Cup 2014
A forgettable World Cup for England in a suitably forgettable first tournament effort from Nike. It was probably wise to go for a subdued, plain opening attempt but if anything, Clive, they might have done that too well.
The problem as ever with a nearly entirely plain white England shirt is that no matter how many design hours have gone into every element of it the end result just looks lazy. The white-on-white shield for the Three Lions doesn’t quite work, either, and what little blue there is here is insufficiently dark. Apparently it’s not royal blue but is in fact ‘sport royal’ which we’re sure is very different in important ways we quite simply do not care to understand.
6) World Cup 2018
Offensively bland. The Ed Sheeran of England shirts. We can’t even be bothered to talk about it. Thank heavens England didn’t actually win the thing wearing this. It would have been mortifying.
READ: England’s 2018 World Cup: Rating all the players
5) World Cup 2006
The red cross on the right shoulder instantly transports us back to Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo and miserably inept penalties. None of that is really the shirt’s fault if we’re honest, and we must try to remain objective here.
It’s okay, this one. Bit of asymmetry is always a gamble on a football shirt but a welcome one and in all our kit rankings we will generally come down harsher on kits that are too plain rather than those that are too busy. We have slightly different feelings about national team home shirts in this regard, with purity given greater weight, but a stylised nod to the country’s literal flag cannot be inherently a bad thing unless you’ve got 15 of them on your house and four on your car.
There’s also just enough navy knocking about on this one to justify the red. That piping at the hem of the shirt? Absolutely key.
4) Euro 2004
A tournament when all things seemed possible and England had a solid kit. Really, this kit should evoke instant thoughts of a young Wayne Rooney tearing it up but for some reason when we see it our first thought is always of Frank Lampard. Not sure what that says about us, but we’re certain it’s not good. Now we’ve stuck a great big picture of him there too, so you’ll have the same wrongheaded thoughts.
Lampard in the 11 shirt to accommodate Paul Scholes in 8 with Steven Gerrard wearing number 4 really does also feel like it’s a pretty perfect encapsulation of England’s problems squishing all three of those very excellent players into the same team. We’re on a tangent here. Let’s get back on track lest we accidentally reopen that old debate, which nobody wants.
If we were minded to nit-pick we might question the red:blue ratio here but that’d be quite wrong of us. The ‘white, blue, red – in that order’ can only be a guide rather than a hard and fast rule and the red sits well here. The risky preponderance of the red means blue for names and numbers was a smart choice here. Balances it out nicely, does that.
3) Euro 2020
More than a hint of Euro 88 about the red pinstripe on navy background for the collar. The red on blue details certainly fit our preference for colour priority and the amount of blue on display makes red an obvious and correct choice for names and numbers in this instance.
But the stacking of England badge on top of Nike badge on top of shirt number looks odder and odder the more we look at it. We can’t remember being this bothered by that at the time, and now we’re judging ourselves quite harshly because now it just looks seriously amiss.
2) World Cup 2002
A bold and risky triumph, that takes just enough of a gamble to stand out but knows to play safe with the rest of the design having made its point. The asymmetric red stripe behind the badge pays off handsomely, with the solid amounts of lovely navy trim and piping to be found all around the place meaning a more than acceptable balance of the three colours is achieved.
A simple white and navy v-neck was a perfect collar choice here; anything fussier would’ve been too busy and undoubtedly interfered with that red feature element.
We’d make a strong argument for the overall kit package at 2002 being England’s best of the 21st century by quite a long way, because the red away kit was another absolute triumph, with the England flag subtly incorporated into the collar and cuffs.
England’s away kit should always be red, of course, which is just yet another obvious point of principle that we’ve allowed to become eroded because we simply are not French enough about taking to the streets in the face of this kind of arrant nonsense. You want to make a blue England kit? You go right ahead and we’ll all agree it’s a third kit. But you will never take away our red away kits.
Is what we should have insisted, but no, we’re too bloody meek aren’t we? Now it’s apparently acceptable to alternate between red and blue away kits because absolutely nothing is sacred in this godforsaken age.
- Euro 2024
An instant classic.
The brand new @nikefootball England kits will worn by our #ThreeLions, @Lionesses and Para Teams in 2024. pic.twitter.com/n56xcwqY0e
— England (@England) March 18, 2024
Long overdue lovely stuff, this. Finally Nike have landed in the precise sweet spot between too plain and too busy, producing a shirt that has just the right amount of navy accents and a very acceptable dash of red that nevertheless stops well short of veering towards the Bolton.
It occurs to us that this might be the definitive guide to a proper good England shirt. It needs to have enough navy to look like it might be a Spurs shirt, enough red to not look like a Spurs shirt, but not so much red that it looks like a Bolton shirt. There you go, Nike. There’s your blueprint for the rest of time. Invoice enclosed etc.
The collar is a gamble. Not because of the flag – let’s be honest, the St George cross is long overdue for some zhuzh-ing up, isn’t it? Rather because it looks a bit like they couldn’t decide between a full collar and a v-neck and ended up doing both and neither. Somehow, though, this horse designed by committee has produced a very handsome camel indeed. And unlike far too many recent England shirts it is also unashamedly a football shirt rather than something overtly and irritatingly designed with polo shirt wear-it-with-jeans thoughts in mind. Some will feel the navy side panels are too much, but f*** those fools, they’re wrong.
But we are once again asking for England to stop being ashamed of their one World Cup star. Stop making it white on white. There are a great many countries who would be enormously proud to have a single World Cup star on their shirts. It’s not like we don’t enjoy banging endlessly on about 1966, so this faux modesty can do one.
Read next: Other nations would never stand for what Nike have done with England kit…
