When the U.S. men’s national team takes the field at the World Cup in a couple of months, they’ll do so wearing a pair of kits that have caused a lot of heartburn. Fans have largely dragged Nike and U.S. Soccer through the mud over the kits, a pair that have been described as unimaginative, bland or downright ugly. In The Athletic’s reader survey, both kits achieved less than a 40% approval rating.
The visceral reaction to the jerseys on social media is in no way surprising. Fashion and design are actual academic disciplines — practices studied for years by aspiring creatives. Yet they are also entirely subjective. Any old person on the internet is entitled to their opinion, and many of those people love sharing it.
I am no different. I’m a man who can barely dress myself. I spent 20 years working on cars, often in a drab, blue jumpsuit emblazoned with my own name, and have spent another 10 working in press boxes that overflow with khakis, polos and dad shoes. And yet none of that has stopped me from writing this. Because I, like many of you, am disappointed by the USMNT’s most recent set of kits. So I thought I’d try my hand at dividing all of the team’s World Cup kits — from 1930 to present day — into tiers based on my personal views on each of them. I repeat: This is only about kits that the USMNT has worn at World Cups.
I am not the first to offer an unsolicited opinion on a soccer shirt, and I won’t be the last. But I’m probably the least knowledgeable person to do it. Now here are the tiers.
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Tier 1: Exceptional
1934 World Cup
The USMNT almost always wore white during its early history, having done so at the 1930 World Cup and the Olympics in 1924 and 1928. Trace back even further, to the team’s earliest internationals in the 1910s, and you’ll see more of the same — usually a plain white v-neck with a center-aligned crest.
They bucked this trend at the 1934 World Cup to great effect with a long-sleeved, no-nonsense, blue v-neck, that they wore in their two matches for the tournament. The first was a play-in game against Mexico — Aldo “Buff” Donelli scored four goals against the Mexicans in that one, setting an all-time USMNT mark for most goals by a player in a single game (that mark still stands, though Jesus Ferreira tied it earlier this year by bagging four against Grenada in a Nations League match… slightly lower stakes there.) Early editions of the World Cup were single-elimination affairs, and after getting thrashed 7-1 in their opener against host nation Italy, the U.S. were sent packing, and this kit was relegated to the dustbin of history.
The 1934 World Cup as a whole seems oft-forgotten in USMNT history, sandwiched between the team’s inaugural appearance four years prior and its memorable defeat of England in 1950. Yet it featured some of the team’s early, all-time greats — Donelli, Billy Gonsalves and Tom Florie — wearing, for the first time in meaningful competition, a blue kit.
1950 World Cup
You could make an argument that no USMNT kit, save maybe the 1994 denim kit, is more iconic than the one sported at the 1950 World Cup. Designed in-house, the kit is nothing special, on the surface — a plain white number with a red sash, sporting a crest that would make Captain America proud. This kit is the first real example, though, of an unscientific yet undeniable trend in jersey design: even a simple, bland kit can be burned into the annals of history by what’s done by the players who wore it.
And that’s probably more true with this 1950 kit than any other the U.S. men have ever worn. One look at the shirt sparks images of Joe Gaetjens being carried off the field in it after what remains far and away the most shocking victory in U.S. soccer history, the team’s 1-0 victory over mighty England. As St. Louis sportswriter Dent McSkimming would later put it, it was “as if Oxford University sent a baseball team over here and it beat the Yankees.” Exactly the type of core memory that can make an average kit a truly memorable one for all-time.
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1994 World Cup away — the “denim kit”
No kit in the history of the men’s program is more polarizing than the loud, brash, gaudy one sported by the U.S. as it hosted the World Cup for the first time in the summer of 1994. Some love it, some hate it, but everybody remembers it.
The story behind the shirt is truly a testament to how much things have changed in terms of the design process itself. Peter Moore, the star designer who helped craft the thing, had at that point already made his mark in sportswear by designing the Jordan 1 and the Jumpman logo, and he’d go on to design some of Major League Soccer’s most iconic brand identities. Adidas had been instructed by the U.S. Soccer Federation to think outside the box, to try and find a design that would be uniquely American. Moore’s design team chose a denim print, laid out a dozen or so paper stars over it and set the whole thing down on a xerox machine. They pressed the copy button, dragged the fabric downwards as the machine scanned and viola — they created the most iconic design in U.S. soccer history.
Early on, the players hated the design, and many fans did, as well. On its release, an Adidas spokesperson called it “daring and painful,” which is hilarious. It was derided in the press at home and abroad. But by the end of the tournament — by the time the U.S. had made a surprising run to the knockout stage and cemented the country’s place in the landscape of global soccer — many had come around to it. Adidas sold thousands of replica shirts and said they could’ve sold many more had they not underestimated demand.
Modern designers could learn a thing or two from Moore’s work: he knew to use design elements culled from American history and the flag itself, something that’s almost always sure to yield a memorable result.
1998 World Cup away
Nike inked a deal with U.S. Soccer in 1995, replacing long-time kit supplier Adidas. The 1998 World Cup in France was the sportswear giant’s first effort at a World Cup kit and they did not miss the mark, decking the USMNT out in a pair of memorable looks. The darker variant of this design is the stronger of the two — a vibrant red shirt that sports a full-width, blue-and-white band from sleeve to sleeve.
When was the last time you saw one of these? While the denim jersey has become more and more common at U.S. matches — there are a variety of reproductions available at this point — you almost never see either of the ‘98 kits. Maybe they were in short supply, but it’s more likely that U.S. fans just aren’t particularly eager to revisit a World Cup performance that was an unmitigated fiasco. Divorce this kit from those awful memories, though, and it’s a standout.
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2010 World Cup away
I’m of the opinion that the USMNT should pick two lanes, in terms of its primary and secondary kits. The first kit should always be some variation of the “Waldos” — the red-and-white hoops they wore in 2012 that are almost universally adored. The away kit should be, well, it should pretty much always be some variation of these beautiful 2010 World Cup secondaries.
U.S. Soccer and Nike were unquestionably looking to reference the 1950 “Miracle on Grass” when they came out with this in 2010, so much so that they had Walter Bahr, the man who assisted on Gaetjens’ game-winner against England, at the jersey release. Dark blue has always worked, in my view, as an ideal color for the U.S.’s away kits — it’s a color sported by the country’s original revolutionaries, and a hundred years later by the folks on the right side of the U.S. Civil War.
And again, the sash is as iconic an element as there is in American soccer kit design. The USMNT has always done well sporting one — from the 1950 World Cup, to the 2010 edition of the tournament, to the… 1959 Pan-American games? In that tournament, the U.S. wore its sash and clobbered Mexico and Brazil, finishing in third place behind only the Brazilians and Argentina. What, you guys don’t remember the 1959 Pan-Am games?
2014 World Cup away
As a whole, the U.S.’s 2014 kits were their strongest ever at a World Cup. We’ll get to the home kit later, but the away kit — commonly referred to as the “bomb pops” — were among Nike’s best efforts. It’s red… it’s white… it’s blue… it looks like a classic American confectionery treat. What could go wrong?
First things first, this thing is not a Bomb Pop, by the purest sense of the name. The classic popsicle was first released in 1955 and features, from the top down, a red, white and blue color scheme while the jersey opts for blue, white and red. The jersey is also, as best I can tell, not edible.
Despite these shortcomings, the kit truly shines — it’s primarily red, a rarity for any U.S. kit. It feels like a statement, not an afterthought. My only quibble with the kit as a whole has nothing to do with the shirt, it’s that pairing the shirt with red shorts, as the U.S. always did, gives it a weird, blocky look. One they could’ve avoided by using blue shorts.
Tier 2: Average
I won’t spend much time here.
There were no press releases when tiny English kitmaker St. Margaret’s manufactured the USMNT’s 1930 kit, but I imagine the word “clean” would’ve been used at least once. It’s a white shirt with a crest, nothing more. The kit is meaningful, of course, in that it was worn for the U.S.’s World Cup debut, but aside from that, there’s not a lot to say. The team’s 1998 home shirt is pretty nice but looks much, much better in blue. Four years later, the USMNT’s 2002 home and away kits were at least interesting, featuring mesh inserts and random polygonal details, but they’ve aged horrendously and are incidentally the shirts that remind me most of the USMNT’s 2022 home kit, one of their worst-ever shirts. The 2006 away shirt is probably the blandest thing the U.S. has worn in the modern era — too generic to cause even the slightest emotional response.
The 2010 home kit and the 2014 home kit are the two strongest on this list, just a hair away from promotion to tier one. Had the sash on the 2010 white shirt been a bit stronger — it looks almost invisible as-is — it wouldn’t find itself here. The 2014 home shirt is basically a white polo but looks elegant and is bolstered by the fact that the U.S. had a decent showing wearing them. The U.S.’s 2022 away strip — the tie-dye ones — are much, much better than their home kits, but still miss the mark. I sort of lump this kit into the same group as the bevy of MLS kits that use random, irrelevant, often sublimated patterns that have little or no connection to the team itself.
Tier 3: Awful
1990 World Cup home and away
Here are the kits worn by the #USMNT at the 1990 #WorldCup
— Thomas 🇺🇸 (@USKeeper) August 11, 2022
The U.S. made their first appearance at a World Cup in 40 years wearing a straight-up Adidas template emblazoned with a crest that looks like the back of a terribly designed commemorative coin. I’ve never seen one of these kits in the wild, though they crop up from time to time on eBay for a few hundred bucks. Truth be told, there was minimal interest in the ‘90 team’s participation at the tournament and Adidas probably didn’t think to manufacture a large cache of reproductions.
The fact that the USMNT qualified for the tournament at all was memorable enough, but Adidas could’ve done a lot better to outfit them in something that would’ve matched the team’s efforts.
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1994 World Cup home
Here’s an unpopular take: this is the worst jersey in U.S. men’s soccer history (the only other truly, truly dreadful one that comes to mind is the pinstriped numbers they wore at the 2007 Copa America.) What’s hilarious is that I’ve spent so much time calling on designers to incorporate traditionally American imagery into their designs. Heck, I just praised Peter Moore at the top of this piece for incorporating elements of the American flag into his design, yet when Adidas just basically takes a huge chunk of the flag and throws it on a kit, this happens.
The “waviness” of the red and white stripes is obviously meant to make the kit look like it’s blowing in the breeze, but they give the top sort of a billowy, pirate shirt vibe. In the end, the USMNT only wore this kit for a single game — their 1-0 loss to Brazil in the World Cup round of 16 — and it’s simply been forgotten beneath the shadow cast by the denim kit.
This kit could’ve had a saving grace — during the run-up to the tournament, the USMNT wore it with denim-printed shorts, which broke it up nicely, as opposed to the plain red shorts it sported in the Cup itself. As a whole, it remains dreadful.
2006 World Cup home
In 2006, Nike produced one of the all-time best USMNT kits (the lovely throwback kit modeled after the 1950 World Cup shirt) and one of the absolute worst. It’s a white T-shirt with off-center, vertical bands of blue and red. It looked dated upon its release and looks even worse nowadays, trapped in that terrible vortex of mid-aughts design, tucked into a dresser somewhere next to a pair of boot cut jeans.
And they did this in a year where the USMNT was likely at the apex of its game in terms of hype, hilariously and unjustly ranked fourth in FIFA’s very-flawed global rankings as they took the field to the dulcet tones of “Don’t Tread,” the greatest hype song in the history of professional soccer sports.
The USMNT laid an egg at the 2006 tournament, crashing out in the group stage and squandering all that pre-tournament attention. A better performance might have saved this kit from the trash heap of history, but probably not: it was awful on its own.
2022 World Cup home
We’ve all spent enough time already railing against this jersey on Twitter. This one isn’t a case of Nike failing to achieve its stated goal with a shirt — they openly stated, on release of this kit, that it was meant to incorporate the design language of other sports, including American football. The jerseys are also purposefully cut a little looser than normal. The combination of those two things has led to a largely forgettable effort that looks ill-fitting, something more worthy of Socker Slam than a World Cup, a PlayStation Evolution Soccer computer-generated kit come to life.
I’ve comforted myself by adopting a belief I’ve seen widely shared on Twitter: maybe Nike just views these 2022 kits as a step toward the real prize, the 2026 kits. Jerseys that will be scrutinized and potentially purchased by millions of Americans when the World Cup returns to their country for the first time in 40 years. We’ll see.
(Top photo: Nike)
