[Editor’s Note: The 2024-25 PL season begins tonight, so to bring you previews of all the kits, our own Jamie Rathjen and Anthony Emerson will each tackle half the league. Jamie is handling Part I, and Anthony will have Part II a bit later today. Enjoy! — PH]
Your 2024-25 Premier League Preview, Part 1
by Jamie Rathjen
The new Premier League season starts today, and we’ve split this year’s preview into two halves of 10. I’ll keep this introduction short because there are no league-wide Uni Watch-adjacent changes besides the annual new ball design (shown above). Keep in mind that not everything has been released yet; in particular, participants in European competition like to wait until those start in September to release third kits.
As we start another nine-month slog through it all, we’re here now and who knows where we’ll be at the end? Let’s get started.
Arsenal
As a starting point, all three of Arsenal’s shirts this season only have a cannon as the crest instead of a full shield. It’s a retro touch of sorts, but the cannon faced the other way before the early 2000s. The first shirt features blue accents, which are recurring and last appeared two years ago.
The black second shirt is consciously influenced by the pan-African color scheme as the result of a collaboration with the brand Labrum London. Unlike last season, the women’s team didn’t get their own second-choice design, which is disappointing. The third shirt is sky blue with some purple thrown in.
Aston Villa
Villa, having switched manufacturers to Adidas from Castore, have only released one shirt so far and it’s pretty basic. Claret body, blue sleeves, nothing much else besides a pinstriped collar. The second shirt came out today and ended up being white with accents in the other two colors — also fairly standard.
Villa also have a new crest this season. Yesterday, they introduced a system of legacy numbers for each player that has turned out for the men’s team — but like the other PL club to do this, Tottenham Hotspur, Villa didn’t include women in this project, which I find unacceptable. They did not immediately say if, also like Tottenham, the numbers would be worn on the shirt.
Bournemouth
The red and black stripes have gold accents this time. There’s often a reason for gold, and here it’s both the club’s 125th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of their first promotion to the Premier League after the 2014-15 season.
The second shirt is an extremely ’90s throwback to what the club calls “the pizza shirt” and naturally deals in teal-ish green with purple. It is toned down from the original, thankfully.
The blue third shirt is based on Bournemouth’s seaside, which is an obvious enough idea that still looks really good. I think this set is my pick of these 10 clubs. (I would like also to praise Bournemouth for letting people buy both ad-free and women’s team shirts, both of which allow one to skip the betting ad.)
Brentford
Brentford took the rare step of keeping last season’s first shirt for two seasons. The stated reason for this is both “affordability” — as in, so fans aren’t expected to buy another first shirt this season — and environmental considerations.
In exchange for that, we get a pink second shirt (surprise) and a dark green third shirt. To me the way to do pink correctly is to not make it too intense, and I think this pink is pale enough to work, but I’ll have to see them wear it.
Brighton and Hove Albion
The first shirt is predominately white this year, which is a change from predominately blue, and the main talking point is the pinstripes within the stripes. The yellow second shirt also has pinstripes in navy blue. It’s supposed to call back to the 2013-14 design, but I’m not sure why besides that they must think it looked good — Brighton weren’t in the PL then and lost in the men’s Championship’s promotion playoffs.
The sleeve ad is one of the more non sequitur advertising campaigns out there: the city of Kissimmee, Florida, which seems to want to advertise to British tourists. (They’re also the ad for the Netball Super League’s player of the match award.)
Chelsea
Chelsea went with a flame or molten metal theme this season, but I don’t think you’d realize from the way it turned out on the first shirt and shorts. I’m not sure what’s going on with it and that sums up Chelsea right now. They’ve been throwing around a lot of money, even by PL standards, for players on the men’s side without much return except for a really bloated squad over 50 strong. Both teams will have new managers after the two last season, Emma Hayes and Mauricio Pochettino, have likely both ended up coaching the US national teams.
So their wardrobe may be the least of their concerns. The second shirt has some orange accents thrown in to keep up with the flame theme and is generally not quite as out there. A third shirt is probably to come.
Crystal Palace
If you didn’t realize that’s an eagle on Palace’s crest, you sure will now with these offerings. Those are eagles all over the first shirt, with one really big one each on the front and back of the yellow second shirt. Yellow is a recurring second-choice color for Palace dating back to the ’60s, as they point out. This is also Palace’s first season in the Women’s Super League.
The men’s team’s gambling ad made headlines when it was first announced because it basically came out of nowhere apparently with a view to advertising in East Asian countries, which are a big TV market for the Premier League but also generally don’t have legal gambling.
Everton
Another new manufacturer (Castore, from Hummel), another safe first offering. It’s also Everton’s last season at Goodison Park before they move to a new stadium. Neither of these designs plays that up, although the second shirt claims to by mentioning something about floodlights. I’m not sure black can be worn against other blue teams, so it might not appear more than a handful of times.
Fulham
Fulham have stuck with Adidas since 2013, but never tend to get anything that eye-catching. The white first shirt is one of Adidas’s templates for this season, complete with the stripes down the front (this time in red) that were on display at the summer international tournaments. Red and black stripes are a recurring second-choice design, being Fulham’s two other colors besides white.
The purple third shirt came out earlier this week and is more adventurous, which is probably the right move after two other traditionalist designs.
Ipswich Town
Musician Ed Sheeran is an Ipswich fan, also now a part-owner, and grew up nearby, so his Mathematics Tour’s logo has been Ipswich’s main ad since 2021. They’re back in the Premier League for the first time since being relegated in 2002.
The blue first shirt has white pinstripes, while the second shirt is burgundy, which again is striking me as too dark to wear against other blue teams. The third shirt is pink (yeah, it’s back), might appear more often, and is supposed to be based on the color known as Suffolk pink that appears all over houses in the area. It also features Framlingham Castle in its skyline, which is in Sheeran’s hometown and made it into his song “Castle on the Hill.”
Been waiting for this!
Great write up Jamie. I wouldn’t be opposed to you injecting more of your opinions into things like this. With that being said, I appreciate the distinction between preview and review. Being a huge soccer fan, I’ve already seen all of these kits countless times, so it would be nice to hear some criticisms.
Phil, the PL actually kicks off tonight!
Ah…my bad. Now fixed!
Those particular Fulham kits are only for the women’s squad. The men will still be wearing the SBOTOP ad. AEW will only appear in the women’s 5th tier league.
Good stuff so far, but I would disagree that Arsenal Women didn’t get a different clash kit. They’re representing the same club, they should wear the same uniforms. Not only is this way uniform, it eliminates anyone protesting that the women are somehow “less than” for getting a different clash kit.
That said, as a Gooner myself, I do not like this year’s primary. Too much white down the sides, and the blue swashes on the backs of the shorts aren’t flattering. Last year’s kit was better, and I loved the recent clash kits in Art Deco black/gold and the pink sets. The teal/lavender set is fashionable and distinctive.
That new adidas template is unfortunate with that swoops down the side and made worse by continuing to the shorts. A couple at least have the same colors on that spot so it’s not noticeable.
Agreed! This adidas template is downright abysmal. It’s a shame this writeup doesn’t show the shorts with that massive, swooping line of color, very late 90s. It also doesn’t look like they designed it to be worn untucked, so the detail on the shirt and shorts never seem to line up.
One of the most interesting things about the sport the rest of the world calls Football is the sharp contrast between the visual lexicon of European sports and those of North America. I love patterns but the only ones I see on teams of the Big Four are stripes and (sometimes) pinstripes with few exceptions; whereas soccer avails itself to a large palette of organic and synthetic patterns which evolve and change.
Can someone who knows soccer better than me, so pretty much everyone, explain to me how all the different balls isn’t a problem? They seem to all have different panels, both in number and shape. Seems like they would perform differently.
Apart from a very few famous outliers (such as the “Jabulani” 2010 World Cup Ball), there is very little difference in performance. There are three standard tiers, and balls of the same tier will perform very similarly.
So what will they wear when Everton matches up against Ipswich? Blue v. Black? Black v. Burgundy?
Villa did the right thing by casting off Castore, too bad Everton fell for them. Inferior brand from a quality and styling point of view, even when the adidas template for this season is not pleasing to the eye either. Somehow La Liga and Serie A have teams with better looking kits than the PL.