Ranking the best and worst Euro 2024 home kits: a diaper, a wrestling outfit and a beautiful QR code

It would seem churlish to review this Ukraine kit given the circumstances. It’s the same shirt they have been wearing since 2021, because their relationship with manufacturers Joma has frayed and is coming to an acrimonious end next month. Joma, a Spanish company but with strong Ukrainian links, caused some outrage last year when it signed a deal to also supply kits to Zenit Saint Petersburg, which understandably didn’t go down well, given it had promised to stop working with Russian clubs after the start of the war in 2022. Ukraine will be switching to Adidas after the tournament, following some schmoozing by FA president Andriy Shevchenko.

Nope. Adidas have gone rather off-piste with Belgium’s designs this year, and while their away kit has garnered widespread praise for its sheer audacity, this one is not so great. It sort of looks like an AI-generated tribute to early 2000s design, which is possibly a shrewd theory given that retro stuff is still good business, but it just looks quite chunky and clunky. The design is inspired by “contemporary architecture and luxury fashion design” apparently, if anyone can tell us what that’s supposed to mean…

Rubbish. This is the problem with a smaller nation being with one of the big manufacturers: for a start, at the time of writing at least, you can’t buy the Slovakia shirt from the Nike website. Which actually might not be the end of the world… because it’s rubbish. Just an ugly combination of primary colours that make it look like a bad school uniform, but forced onto a Nike template. I repeat (again): rubbish.

This kit takes you on a journey. If you start from the shoulders, it’s pretty good: nice chunky and bold white collar, fairly basic design but with a vertical detail that does look a bit like barbed wire (but can’t be… right?), similarly chunky white trim on the sleeves, but then you get down near the waist and it all gets a bit weird. The red turns into a sort of inexplicable maroon colour on the hips and lower back… which continues onto the shorts… which is odd, but not all the shorts, because on the lower back part of them it reverts to the red of the shirt. So basically the lower back, crotch and rump region are maroon, and the rest is red… which does make it look like the players are wearing a maroon diaper. It’s all just extremely, extremely weird.

If you were a wrestling fan in the early 1990s, you may remember Bam Bam Bigelow, a robust young man who tended to wear black outfits spiced up with red and yellow flame designs. He came to mind when looking at the sleeve details on this Germany shirt, which aren’t too bad on the short-sleeved version, with the ‘flames’ fading out, but on the long sleeves the flames fade out… then start up again towards the cuffs, which just looks odd. Like a musician who stops playing a song too early, then tries to pick up again at a random point and just sounds absurd as a result. Would be a pity if they win their home tournament dressed like this.

Not a strong tournament for Adidas, this one. Some of their designs have gone so off-reservation it’s absurd, while others just look like they haven’t tried. This Hungary number very much falls into the latter category — an incredibly lazy template that just looks like someone has fished a kit out of the ‘2002 remainders’ box and slapped the Hungarian crest on it. It doesn’t look too bad because the red-white-green colour combo is naturally great… but it’s otherwise quite disappointing.

Looks very plain, doesn’t it? Because it is. Or maybe it isn’t! If you really squint you can see a sort of wavy pattern going across the body of the shirt. Or can you? Is that just shadow? Really look closely. Stare. Can you see it? For sure? Maybe. All of which proves the point, really: if you really have to look that closely for the pattern, it probably isn’t worth having. Plus, you’re probably going to be seeing this shirt on someone who isn’t a Serbian footballer in the weeks ahead. So if you’re not careful, you’re just going to be spending a lot of time staring intently at a stranger’s chest. Which, I believe, is quite rude.

Now, hang on a minute. What sort of thing is happening here? This is just exactly the same kit as at Euro 2020. Well, almost exactly the same. They’ve taken the red trim off the cuffs and moved the Nike logo from above the red chest stripe to below it. Look, we know there are some traditions, and you can’t always mess with beloved designs, but you’d expect a little more imagination than this. It’s a perfectly fine shirt and does the job well enough, but come on now.

Macron has got its timings a bit weird, having released a new batch of kits in March 2023 on a two-year cycle, meaning its client teams will travel to Euro 2024 with a kit they’ve already been wearing for a year. Which perhaps doesn’t matter hugely, but does feel a bit of a shame for a country such as Georgia, participating at their first ever major tournament. Especially when the shirt itself absolutely screams, ‘League Two club’s away shirt in the early rounds of the EFL Trophy’.

Looks very much like Liverpool’s shirt this season, doesn’t it? Maybe Puma thought that too, then reasoned it had to make it different somehow, so came up with the wheeze of this background design. And where did that background design come from? Well, I’m glad you asked. It was “inspired by the delicate beauty of Austrian Art Nouveau architecture” which “celebrate the country’s creativity and innovation”. Does that sort of thing really matter? Probably not, just as long as the shirt looks nice. Which this does. Sort of.

There are two types of people in the world: those that like the Netherlands in orange shorts, and those that prefer them in white ones. Your correspondent is the latter, so it’s been a decade of pain since they last donned the white shorts, and it’s a profound disappointment they haven’t gone for it this time. You may have detected a certain amount of vamping here, because there isn’t a huge amount else to say about this Dutch kit. It’s fine, isn’t it? Orange. Bit of bold blue trim. Fine. Not great, not bad. Fine.

I mean… see the entry above, really. It’s always interesting when the same manufacturer does two fairly big nations and essentially delivers the same kit, just with the colours switched around. The Portugal shirt is basically the same as the Netherlands one, even down to the slightly wavy but ultimately nondescript background pattern. At least it’s better than that stupid triangular-halved effort they had for the 2022 World Cup. Plus the colour has been tweaked to make it a slightly deeper, truer red. But there’s not much to get excited about here. The lesson from these Nike kits is that the colours are very important…

Macron is not exactly what you would call a blue-chip manufacturer, but at least it has given Albania a bespoke design rather than a template. The design itself is one of those you have to squint to actually see, and when you do squint, it does look a bit like a magic eye, but when you have managed to focus you can see the double-headed eagle motif from their national crest, sort of looming out from the centre of the shirt. Could that be intimidating for the opposition? You suspect that if they’re looking close enough to see it properly, they’ve got bigger problems.

Nice. Good. Perfectly fine. It’s pleasing that France have returned to a more traditional royal blue colour, after donning a much darker navy in previous tournaments. Perhaps it’s for that reason that they have gone fairly basic with this design, which recalls the French shirts of the 1960s, it says here. The cockerel crest has been super-sized, which is the sort of thing that works on a national team shirt without a sponsor’s logo across the chest, but would make a club one look rather busy.

A reasonable enough shirt, but it doesn’t really feel like a Scotland shirt somehow. This is despite Adidas attempting to go fairly route-one with the national symbolism and attempt a tartan design for the background pattern, which doesn’t really work, because the point of tartan is that it incorporates different colours. The yellow, despite coming from the Scottish football crest, doesn’t really work either, instead looking more like hi-vis strips on a cycling top.

It’s tricky when you have a classic signature design: do you stick with it no matter what, or play with the form? It’s understandable if you don’t want to just keep doing the same thing over and over: take Radiohead, who garnered widespread praise and success with The Bends and OK Computer and were thus under pressure to produce more of the same, but instead put out Kid A, a broadly experimental electronic record which many people hated but others (your correspondent included) loved, even if it took some adjustment. This is Croatia’s Kid A: if it was someone else, it might be pretty popular, but because it’s Croatia, it feels like wilful change for change’s sake.

In past years, Puma’s templates have been an absolute horror show, so it’s something of a relief to see it has gone back to basics a bit this time. The ‘block colour with bold collar and sleeve trim, with some sort of floaty background design’ is a fairly solid bet. It’s not especially creative, but it does the job pretty well, and is at least better than its previous go-to design, which featured a great big stupid shield on the chest. The downside here is that the background design, which is an expanded version of the Czech lion crest, could quite easily just make it look like the wearer is sweating profusely from minute one.

”Inspired by the beauty of Spain’s national flower and the rhythmical movement of ocean waves”, according to Adidas, which sounds very lovely, but it goes on to describe the background pattern on this shirt as ”eye-catching”. Given that you really have to peer very closely to even notice said pattern, it’s perhaps a bit much to call it ”eye-catching”. Still, that possibly doesn’t matter too much, because while it’s otherwise not especially interesting, it is at least bold and simple, which should probably be the default position of any football kit designer.

Here’s another country not getting a new design for their shirt, manufacturer Joma presumably busy churning out new kits for mid-range Serie A clubs or making covert deals in Russia. Seems a bit of a pity, but at least their existing garb is pretty decent. Romania are one of those countries with a pretty bullet-proof colour scheme, so it would take some effort to mess up their bold yellow, blue and red, and this is a perfectly reasonable, if quite plain, example. Just a shame it’s not as iconic as some of their Adidas shirts from years gone by.

This sort of looks like a kit designed for one of those matches where a bunch of YouTubers play against each other and millions of people inexplicably stream it. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad kit: it’s a bit busy, with a slightly odd strip of diamonds down the middle and the mountain symbol betwixt their national crest and the Nike logo, but at least it’s a little bit different to some of the other cookie-cutter efforts that some of the big boys have put out this year.

This is arguably where Nike’s more basic approach pays off: with a country that has clean, bold, contrasting colours. Solid collar, strong sleeve trim, big eagle crest in the middle, Nike logo underneath. Bish, bash, bosh. Done. The Nike blurb attempts to over-intellectualise the whole endeavour, solemnly declaring this to be a ”bold twist on a classic” and a ”nod to the great teams that helped inspire a generation of change”, whatever that means. Don’t worry about that, guys and gals: it’s just a clean, nice shirt. Let’s not get giddy.

It shouldn’t be a good shirt. It’s very template-y. Not much imagination has gone into it. It’s Italy wearing Adidas, which still feels dreadfully wrong (let’s not get started on Germany’s imminent switch to Nike). But somehow this feels quite right. Have I been duped? Am I a shill now? Am I in the pocket of Big Kit? Have I just been bewitched by the tricolour stripes down the shoulders? Am I realising that, actually, Italy and Adidas have been meant for each other for years, and I was just kidding myself that all those Kappa shirts were good? It’s all very confusing.

Recent England shirts have been pretty bad: the last few designs have looked like knock-off gear that somebody found in a kitbag from 1995. This one, however… talk about a return to form. It’s the perfect way to do ‘Basic but not boring’, not too complicated but with a trim that ensures it isn’t just a lazy, plain shirt. Apparently, that trim takes inspiration from the ”training gear worn by England’s 1966 heroes”: a retro nod to the tops Bobby Moore did shuttle runs in is almost wilfully niche, but that doesn’t especially matter when it looks as good as this.

Maybe this is just a shuddering cliche for men of a certain age to go a bit wobbly at the sight of any Hummel-made Denmark kit, but oh my, this is lovely. There are holes you can pick: you’d like to see lengthier Hummel chevrons on the shoulders and sleeves, the background pattern of random small squares looks so much like a QR code you feel if you scan it, you’ll get the menu of a mid-range gastropub popping up on your phone. But step back, take it all in and enjoy it. Yes, please.