The World Cup’s best shirts are already 30 years old

Steve Salter, CNN

(CNN) — Over the next few days, something unusual will be happening across Spanish soccer. Nearly 40 men’s professional clubs in La Liga’s top two divisions will take to the field wearing retro-looking uniforms inspired by their respective histories. The kits were first unveiled at Madrid Fashion Week and are part of a campaign celebrating the country’s love for the sport. It is a fitting prelude.

Ten weeks later, the largest World Cup in history will be held across the US, Canada and Mexico — 48 teams, 104 matches, the most expansive commercial stage the sport has ever assembled. And many players will be wearing nostalgia-laden gear: Adidas recently unveiled new away kits embracing a “90s aesthetic” but designed in a “modern, contemporary way.” They will also bear the brand’s famous trefoil motif — for the first time in more than three decades.

The past is no longer just being collected, but worn, remade and reimagined.

The shirts that changed everything

To understand how soccer arrived here, you have to go further back than expected. “Proper fan replica shirts weren’t widely available until the 1970s,” said Alex Ireland, author of “Pretty Poly: The History of the Football Shirt.” “It was really only in the nineties where they became more broadly acceptable to go to the pub in.”

Umbro’s England away shirt for Euro 96 arguably led the shift from uniform to everyday wear. The two-tone blue striped shirt was designed to pair with jeans — an early acknowledgement that the its life extended beyond the pitch. Technology did the rest. Advances in fabric printing allowed designers to embed complex graphics directly onto material, turning shirts into moving canvases. The result was the most visually inventive decade in the sport’s sartorial history.

“Everyone remembers their first World Cup,” said Sam Handy, General Manager of Football at Adidas. “Those kits get embedded in your memory structures — this is what football looks like.”

Mine was Italia 90 and the West Germany home shirt (pictured at the top) — black, red and gold geometric abstraction across the chest — what remains the holy grail among collectors. Norwegian collector Even Nesset describes something close to involuntary recall: “That shirt gives me a kind of false memory of 1990 — from seeing it, from watching YouTube clips of it being worn on the pitch.” England’s third shirt from the same year — sky blue with distinct geometric patterns, and inseparable from New Order’s hit song “World in Motion” — is listed on Cult Kits’ for $480.

While England didn’t wear the shirt on the pitch itself, its fan favorite status and the team’s semi-final run and subsequent penalty shootout defeat to West Germany, who would go on to win the World Cup, helped ensured its legacy, alongside the more classic white home shirt.

“When a brand takes risks in design and embeds it with a decent run for the team, you have a chance of creating something very visually sticky,” said Handy. Nesset distills it further, classifying “the crazy shirts, bold enough to seem wrong at first (USA 1994, Jamaica 1998, Mexico 1998), and the beautiful shirts, quietly perfect (Colombia 1990, Italy 1994).”

Those shirts spent decades in the margins — traded through flea markets and early eBay. Then, over the past two decades, something structural happened. Dedicated platforms — Classic Football Shirts, Cult Kits, Vintage Football Shirts, Saturdays Football and others — transformed an informal network into a scaled, trusted, global market. Founded by fans who couldn’t find the shirts they wanted, they built what they needed, evolving passion projects into lucrative businesses.

David Jones, co-founder of Cult Kits, describes a buyer base that has transformed. “Seventy percent buy for nostalgia — the players you pretended to be growing up. The rest have discovered soccer kits in a fashion sense.”

From Dua Lipa photographed in a Brazil jersey to Timothée Chalamet spotted in a bright green Mexico 94 shirt, stars began wearing vintage kits as genuine sartorial statements — blokecore making oversized jerseys a defining aesthetic, and one that has proved more than a passing trend. Chalamet is the current high-water mark, Jones suggested, “because he genuinely does love football, so it lands differently.” The same is true of Dua Lipa, a committed Arsenal fan who attends matches.

But this movement runs deeper than celebrity adoption. Psychologist Clay Routledge calls it “historical nostalgia” — a documented longing for eras you never inhabited. His research found 68% of Gen Z adults experience it, and far from being regressive, he argues it is future-oriented: a way of resolving present dissatisfaction by reaching toward something that feels more real. Football shirts are not alone in this. “It’s the same reason we see 100 different Marvel films,” Ireland explained, “you’ve got instant buy-in, a connection that means you don’t need to figure out if you like it. From rebooted franchises, fashion houses mining their archives and generation alpha raised on blended noughties pop, the same force is reshaping culture more broadly.

Cultural critic Simon Reynolds describes the broader condition as “Retromania” — we live in a state of atemporality where 1994 and 2026 exist on the same screen simultaneously. The World Cup crystallizes this. Each tournament is a sealed, re-watchable world — a month of soccer frozen in time. A generation that wasn’t alive for France 98 can spend a weekend inside it on YouTube, emerging with genuine emotional attachments to objects they never encountered in real time.

The summer everything arrives at once

“This is a defining era of soccer culture,” said Handy, “and the jersey is perhaps its clearest expression.” The trefoil — last seen on a World Cup shirt in 1990 — has recently appeared on special edition shirts and now, 25 World Cup competition kits. “We’re just trying to do it all — the past and the future — and letting it all exist at the same time,” Handy added.

Mat Davis, founder of Saturdays Football, has watched the arc from the inside. As the vintage market for men’s soccer jerseys commoditized beneath him — “you search by price, not ‘wow, that’s a unique shirt’” — he pivoted toward original product and, most recently, a partnership with Adidas, embroidering mini versions of the newly released away shirts onto Saturdays Football’s signature caps. Amplification for him, authenticity for Adidas.

Nowhere is that more resonant than with the then-divisive, now cult-classic Adidas-designed US men’s national team’s (USMNT) 94 away shirt. That shirt — a washed-denim effect with diagonally placed white stars — was reportedly met with silence when Adidas first unveiled it to the squad, followed by nervous laughter. Retailers were equally unsure, yet all 50,000 replica kits produced were sold. The bold design would eventually stand the test of time, partly because the team surprised many by reaching the round of 16, wearing the jersey during some of their biggest tournament moments. More than three decades later, the brand has recently released a lifestyle collection of jerseys, jackets, shorts, hats and even a pair of Samba trainers based on the memorable design.

Nike, who have dressed the team since 1995, designed its 2026 kits in close collaboration with players. They will be worn by all 27 US Soccer teams — men’s, women’s and youth — unifying players under one cohesive, visual identity for the first time. In some ways, the curvy red and white stripes have a similarly bold, visual language to those scattered stars of the Adidas 1994 shirt.

Rather than legacy, Handy says design becomes an infinite loop: iconic styles becoming part of the visual canon, to be drawn from in perpetuity.

This summer, that loop closes on home soil. Major League Soccer, founded in 1993 as part of the US’ bid to host its first World Cup the following year, has helped the sport reportedly overtake baseball as America’s third favorite sport, according to a survey by The Economist. The World Cup returns not to a country where professional soccer is a novelty, but to one that has quietly, irreversibly, made the game its own.

USMNT midfielder Tyler Adams put the stakes plainly: “I want to have that kit you look back at in 30 years and you’re like, that’s still the best one.” This summer, someone in the crowd will be wearing a vintage jersey from 1994 or a reissue, while others will be wearing updated ones designed to be coveted decades later.

Inside the collar of Belgium’s Adidas away shirt, a hidden line of text aptly reads: “Ceci n’est pas un maillot.” This is not a jersey. Well, not just a jersey anymore.

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