Ranking all 24 Euro 2024 away kits: Spain done dirty while Portugal and France dazzle

Dave Tickner
Euro 2024 away kit ranking
Euro 2024 away kit ranking

This is the good stuff. International home kits are all well and good. There are good ones and great ones, and the current crop is absolutely fine overall.

But away kits are where the fun’s at. You’re constrained in the world of home kits by a specific and often strictly limited colour palette and, often but not always, conservative design choices tend to follow. None of that in the world of away kits where you can, and manufacturers frequently do, offer up whatever you like.

Does it always work? No, but even when it goes wrong like it has for poor old Spain at least it’s usually visually arresting rather than dreary. That said, there are a disappointing number of drab efforts this year and they have been suitably punished in the rankings.

The home rankings can be found here if you can bear to look at what those monsters have done to Croatia.

 

24) Slovakia
We weren’t exactly raving about the home kit, but it at least had a halfway interesting combination of colours. Slovakia’s away kit is also chucked on the old Vapor template and is… white. With a bit more white around the collar.

‘Just a white T-shirt with some badges on’ is usually an unfair and simplistic criticism of a football shirt. Usually.

23) Spain
This one is, according to the adidas promotional guff, supposed to represent ‘a bustling Spanish beach in the middle of summer’. Alas, it is a beach full of English tourists vomiting up last night’s cerveza and sangria while apparently still bleeding after picking a fight with the local law enforcement.

We will nearly always reward rather than punish boldness, especially in away kits. But the whole reason we applaud risk-taking in away kits is precisely because of the fact it’s a risk. It can go badly wrong. This has gone badly wrong. Vomit green, pale blue and bright blood red are not a winning combination, it turns out. But hey, at least now we know.

 

22) Turkey
Instantly forgettable once you’ve reminded yourself that yes, this is the away kit and not the home one. The sheer simplicity of it really only adds to the ‘home kit’ vibe, because away kits are not the place for such safety-first considerations. Maybe the still-recent decision to switch back to white-and-red for the home and red for the away is considered enough of a jolt for Nike to refuse to consider even the slightest hint of risk in the design itself. Such as actually having any design, for instance.

They might well be right, but this is very dull indeed. Let’s move on.

21) Albania
Identical design to the home shirt, but the white and black is nowhere near as striking as the red-and-black combo. The bright red of the Albanian crest does slightly lift this, but we’re mainly annoyed at seeing the black Macron logo here, which the home shirt was crying out for.

20) Ukraine
An old kit, colour-switched from the home. We won’t go into the reasons again, but still. It’s a decent enough kit, but it’s three years old now.

Ukraine F365
Ukraine England

19) Czechia
More dreary Puma blandness after the relentless sameness of their home kit offerings. We can’t fully explain the science of it, but this looks less like a football top and more like something worn by a surly 19-year-old tennis wonderkid reluctantly adhering to the Wimbledon dress code during a shock four-set defeat to a grizzled British wildcard ranked 273 in the world with an awkward lefty serve who knows his way around a grass court and is cheered to the rafters out on Court Two by Pimms-sipping strawberry-guzzlers in Union Jack waistcoats.

18) Croatia
Generally what you do when tasked with making Croatia’s kits is do a brilliant home kit because it’s almost impossible not to and then have a bit of fun with the checkerboard on the away. This time, some absolute clown at Nike decided to have his fun with the home shirt and manage to b*llocks up the easiest gig in international kit design bar none.

The away kit suffers from being too subdued, which shows how hard this game actually is and also that we are literally impossible to please at times. There’s just not enough contrast between the dark blue and even darker blue here but it’s not overtly offensive and therefore miles and miles and miles better than the home shirt. We’ve got all worked up again. Honestly, though. How do you f*ck that shirt up? It’s almost impressive in a grotesque way.

17) Georgia
We really rather liked the home kit, with its bold attempt at replicating the cross over the shoulders and chest. But retaining that design element in shiny black on a black shirt hasn’t worked anywhere near as well. To have any chance, this would need to be a full blackout shirt but the collar and crest are red with the Macron logo in inexplicable white.

We still don’t think it would have quite worked, but full commitment to the bit might have given it a chance.

16) Netherlands
It’s all well and good to have a shirt inspired by the De Stijl art movement of your Theo van Doesburgs and your Piet Mondrians, but you must, must, must make sure the end result doesn’t look like the upholstery from a Megabus. Nike would do well to remember that next time.

15) Serbia
A token effort at interesting from the apparently entirely uninterested Puma design team for this tournament with some mildly distracting red and blue cuff details. It says an awful lot about Puma’s overall effort at this tournament that this stands out as much as it does. “Oh, they’ve done the bare minimum of halfway interesting things you can do to a football shirt, hats off.” And surely at some point we need to talk about the fact Puma have four teams at this tournament, every single one of which has a primarily red home kit and a primarily white away kit chucked onto a very bland template.

14) Poland
Training-top vibes from a top that is simultaneously somehow too boring and too busy with the assorted shades of red competing for attention yet combining to make something really quite alarmingly bland. That lovely big Poland badge does all it possibly can to try and save things, but even that can do only so much.

13) Romania
If you’re going to steer away from the fun route with an away kit, then producing something that complements the home is an acceptable route. No colours to flip on Romania’s all-yellow home kit, but all red and maintaining the flag motif to the cuffs makes it an obvious companion piece. But it really is only those cuffs saving this from the basement.

12) Denmark
Only Hummel and Denmark could just about get away with serving up a plain white polo shirt with a bit of red trim. But just because they’ve got away with it doesn’t mean we’re not disappointed in them.

Yes, it’s not fair that we hold them to higher standards than others, but we know what they’re capable of and this isn’t it.

 

11) Hungary
Adidas have gone bold with plenty of away kits for this tournament, but play safe with Hungary by once again demonstrating the three-colour capabilities of their main Euro 2024 template kit. This is absolutely fine, but we prefer the home version.

10) Slovenia
The central contrast stripe and Triglav motif works better than on the home kit and the two blues are working together nicely here. It’s another Vapor template effort, but unlike Slovakia at least Slovenia got some actual design work on theirs rather than just generic teamwear.

9) Switzerland
We hastily dismissed this as nothing more than a late noughties Tottenham shirt on first glance, before noticing the subtle light blue patterns that elevate this really quite significantly. It’s not the best white-with-light-blue-detail away shirt at this tournament, but it’s still really rather good.

8) Austria
Really quite funny that the only interesting thing Puma have done on any of their kits for this summer – put some light blue bits and bobs on a plain white base – they’ve done twice. Fair f*cks, though. If it works, it works. Switzerland and Austria both have good away kits which are pretty hard to separate in ranking terms so we haven’t really bothered. Both are just miles and miles clear of everything else Puma have offered up.

7) Germany
Likely to divide opinion, but we rather like it and ‘too bold’ is nearly always preferable to ‘too boring’ when it comes to away kits.

Pink and purple certainly qualifies as bold, but the balance of the colours here is absolutely spot on, and the geometric pattern in the gradient from one colour to the other is lovely. We will always be suckers for geometric patterns on an adidas Germany shirt, let’s be honest. We might be overthinking this, but is there also just a hint of a nod to the 1990 goalkeeper shirt here?

One more minor but we think crucial decision that helps this work was the acknowledgement that the sheer boldness of the two main colours mean white is absolutely the right choice for badges, crests, name-sets and such. A different choice there could easily have tipped this into ‘If anything, Clive, they’ve almost jazzed it up too well’ territory.

 

6) Italy
We’re still adjusting to Italy and adidas being a thing, but this tournament is definitely going to help. What adidas have done with both Italy kits at this tournament is highlight how ‘template’ need not mean lazy or boring if it’s done right. As with the home effort, there’s some playful and clever design choices to bring the colours from Italy’s flag into the mix.

Four colours is generally one colour too many for a football shirt, but rules are made to be broken and this shirt does so rather wonderfully.

 

 

5) Scotland
We’re not quite sure how they’ll get on at this tournament, but one thing we do know is that Scotland will look absolutely mint while doing it. Their home kit is excellent, and this might be even better despite opting for the ultimate away kit gamble of making a blue kit the alternate to a blue kit.

It’s fine here, though, with the away the palest of blues and the home the very darkest, and the purple working superbly as an accent colour.

This would be fine if that were all it had in its favour, but the hero of this kit is undoubtedly those side panels, which give off a pleasing whiff of retro without looking dated. The back of the shirt also features a playful update of the Saltire, about which the nation of Scotland has given precisely zero f*cks. Interesting.

4) Belgium
“What if we did a Belgium football kit inspired by Tintin?” is an absolutely brilliant idea and we will listen to absolutely no counter-argument. We just hope whichever absolute hero had the balls to say it out loud at that first design meeting a) got promoted and b) is now working on a Hercule Poirot-inspired kit for the 2026 World Cup.

3) England
Weren’t at all convinced when we first saw it, but it’s grown on us relentlessly ever since. Again, risk-taking is good and to be encouraged on away kits and this is certainly that. Purple isn’t really the right colour for an England away kit, but – and maybe this is irredeemably stupid on our part – we’re totally taken in by the ‘Ah, but what colour do you get if you mix the light blue and red of traditional England away kits?’ marketing spiel.

Alexander-Arnold England
Trent Alexander-Arnold celebrates scoring for England.

We’re not even bothered that they’ve called the resulting colour ‘raisin’. Who doesn’t like raisins? They’re nature’s candy. And those side panels don’t really make much sense but look really good and at the end of the day that’s the real quiz. This could easily have gone horribly wrong and ended up bottom of the pile but somehow it’s all come together in the end and worked perfectly. Hopefully the same is true of England’s defence in Germany this summer.


 

2) Portugal
Yes. This is how you do an out-there away kit. The blue Azulejo architectural pattern on an off-white base takes this dazzlingly close to a work of actual art. ‘Hang it in the Louvre’ is a dreadful cliché, but sometimes you have to accept the cliché has a point. Hang it in the Louvre. It’s magnificent.

1) France
Just outrageously, ridiculously, provocatively good. Magnifique even. Pinstripes and a massive cockerel would already be a winner, evoking instant memories of a far less complicated time in Michel Platini’s football narrative arc, but having those pinstripes subtly shift from blue to red across the shirt is utter genius. France have got absolutely spectacular gear for this tournament, the bastards.

Kylian Mbappe during an international match for France.

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