MLS 2025: Eastern Conference New Kits

Good Thursday morning, Uni Watchers. I hope everyone had a pleasant Wednesday.

The 2025 MLS season begins this Saturday, and it’s actually the league’s 30th season. For those who don’t typically follow the Beautiful Game (or at least MLS), the league expanded to 30 clubs this season with the addition of San Diego FC, an expansion team awarded in 2023. There are two conferences (Eastern and Western), now divided neatly into 15 teams apiece. As you folks probably know, I’m not a soccer guy, so every season I’m blessed to have others far more knowledgeable of kits and histories share their p/reviews of the new MLS uniforms prior to the season’s start. This year, as they both have in the past, our own Jamie Rathjen and Anthony Emerson will each take a look at the new kits. Jamie will start with the Eastern Conference today. There’s a LOT to get to, so I’ll just turn it over to Jamie right now. Catch you guys with the rest of today’s post after this. — PH

• • • • •MLS 2025 Eastern Conference
by Jamie Rathjen

It’s once again time for MLS’s season to start, a week after every team revealed its new shirt in the annual ritual of Jersey Week. The rule is that everybody, bar one plus expansion team San Diego FC this time, gets one new shirt which they then keep for two years.

One league-wide change this season for MLS’s 30th anniversary is the apple in the Apple TV logo everyone wears on their sleeve will have a pattern related to the team’s crest instead of being solid-colored. For example, D.C. United’s is shown here as the D.C. flag with a black instead of white background. (Apple TV has MLS’s TV deal, which allows anyone anywhere with the service to watch but results in a noticeable dearth of games actually on TV here.)

We’re starting with the Eastern Conference today, while Anthony will have the Western Conference tomorrow.

 

Atlanta United

We start with a team whose nickname is uniform-based — “Five Stripes” — but its new first shirt is constrained by Adidas’s template. It’s more like three full stripes and two half ones, and solid black everywhere else. This design is serviceable enough, but absolutely nothing stands out.

 

Charlotte FC

Two of Charlotte’s three second shirts in their short history have now been black after a foray into purple, which has no part in their color scheme, for the past two years. The highlight of this effort is the outstanding, old-school “CLTFC” monogram, which is the kind of thing you don’t see on soccer shirts anymore unless it’s always been there or is throwing back to something. The rest of the design elements seem to be inside references which aren’t going to mean much to you unless you’re a Charlotte fan, but do include a faux coat of arms on the bottom front. There is generally a small patch in that position in these designs, but most aren’t adding much.

Chicago Fire

The Fire have gone with Chicago’s rivers as the reasoning for the blue accents here and the pattern on the front. The front bottom left patch is a “312” area code reference which accounts for most of the red in this design.

FC Cincinnati

It’s FCC’s 10th anniversary, dating to their start in the now-USL Championship. There’s a lot going on here dominated by a wide orange sash, sort of resembling the one from their crest but way bigger. I think choosing one of the two shades of blue would have been preferable to using both, though there’s at least a reason why they did. The team has worn both and has mixed both together before, but never this evenly on the front besides 2020’s halved design. When separated by the sash, it looks like a more piecemeal effort. A 10th-anniversary logo is visible on the bottom left front.

 

Columbus Crew

The Crew’s new black second shirt is supposed to be based on the Goosebumps children’s horror series from R.L. Stine, who is from the area and a fan of the team. I wouldn’t say it needs that connection and it’s perfectly fine in a vacuum, but naturally this design must have a backstory. The yellow parts also glow in the dark under ultraviolet light, which is specifically stated to be a cutting-edge retail thing. Everyone just has UV lights lying around at home, right?

 

D.C. United

I thought it would be hard for DCU to follow up a cherry blossom second shirt of which I was a big fan (and full disclosure: I’m a DCU fan), but did they ever follow it up. It has a simple idea that I can’t believe seemingly no one else has thought of: every Adidas team is stuck with those stripes going down the front and back of the shirts and shorts this season, so why not make them part of the design? Here they have a vaguely psychedelic pattern meant to refer to several music genres, including D.C.’s own go-go, which is already in the name of the local NBA G League team. Even the background of the crest has the same pattern. Like cherry blossoms, this is another part of D.C.’s culture that was about ripe for one of the soccer teams to wear.

 

Inter Miami

Somehow, the Fighting Messis got to break MLS’s rule that everyone gets one new shirt per year and got two, including a black second shirt released well before any of the others in December. That one’s been doing all the work in preseason, while the pink first shirt was revealed last week during Jersey Week. Miami has always stuck to simple, basic designs, this time using similar-color stripes on the pink shirt and halves on the black shirt.

 

CF Montréal

Montréal is back in blue and black stripes for the first time since 2020 and for the first time under their current name, which changed from Montréal Impact in 2021. The team says they’re “defined” by this pattern, which was worn for their first season in 1993, but they’ve worn solid colors as first choice just as often as stripes since joining MLS in 2012.

The design itself suffers from the same problem as Atlanta’s in that there are also exactly five stripes and the outermost ones are cut off. But the black accents on the sleeves help a little bit here.

 

Nashville SC

Nashville’s new second shirt is par for this course: solid blue, yellow accents there because they have to be, city-specific patches in the requisite places, and that’s it. That’s actually described all of Nashville’s MLS-era second shirts bar the one this one replaced, which was black. (Like Cincinnati, Nashville began in what is now the USL Championship.) And like Miami, Nashville is a team that has a good color scheme but has yet to do anything with it in what is going to be its sixth season in MLS.

 

New England Revolution

The Revolution went back to the flag of New England for the first time in 10 years, focusing on its pine tree for their new second shirt. That’s what the pattern is supposed to look like, although it really does down the center and not so much off to the sides. It is also solid white on the back, as modeled by new Patriots coach Mike Vrabel. I would have liked to see more green on this design and less white, either on the shorts, socks, or the back of the shirt. I’m not thinking that the patterns on the front of these shirts always mix well with their solid-colored surroundings.

 

New York City FC

The abstract pattern on the front of the new first shirt for Manchester City’s American outpost is explained away as referencing skyscrapers. I don’t think that adds much, nor has the team attempted to do much more storytelling besides that.

It is also NYCFC’s 10th anniversary (this time, all in MLS), so there is a 10th-anniversary patch in the front bottom left position.

 

New York Red Bulls

Both New York teams have chosen Manhattan as the basis for their designs — this time, the stones of Stone Street — even though neither of them play there. This is the kind of shirt where I’m not sure if you’d guess what the pattern was supposed to be if I didn’t say it. It looks a lot more like camo.

The “NY” in the front bottom left position really looks like it was borrowed from the crest of the NWSL’s Gotham FC, who share a stadium with the Red Bulls. It’s also hidden on the front underneath the Adidas logo (look carefully).

 

Orlando City

City claim that the pattern on the front of their new purple first shirt, supposed to be based on converging weather fronts, will be different on every single shirt. It does at least look like that from this picture. If you’re a fan of area codes on uniforms, spot the very hard to read “407” inside a thunderbolt on the upper back.

 

Philadelphia Union

We somehow continue with the weather pattern with the Union’s new second shirt, which features lightning bolts for reasons best described as the energetic style of play every soccer fan wishes their team would have. It’s also in the colors of Philadelphia’s city flag, which is absolutely fair enough for a team that already wears darker versions of those colors.

Unlike most teams, the Union have already worn this design in preseason, so we can see that it comes with matching socks and yellow shorts. I don’t like that they have two blue shirts, which can turn tricky when playing other blue-clad teams such as Montréal, whose first shirt is solid blue on the back, or Cincinnati. Having to choose the least bad option to avoid a color clash is never ideal.

 

Toronto FC

Toronto are back in solid red as first choice after a weird primarily-grey-with-red-sleeves phase that packed a lot into one design. The main draw this time is three shades of red squeezed together within the confines of the template and probably benefiting from it, because I’m not sure it would have worked without the swishes Adidas placed everywhere. That makes this one of the designs that has nearly-same-color Adidas shoulder stripes as the base color below it, which is kind of unusual — the company would want them to be visible, after all — but appears a few times in this piece.

• • • • •Thanks, Jamie! Awesome rundown as always. Readers? Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below!