Counting down the worst Spurs shirts in Premier League history - featuring a few minor crimes by Nike.
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When we recently counted down our Top 10 best - and very worst – new kits for the 2025/26 season, we started thinking about a few clubs which often seem to have some of the very best or worst shirts in the Premier League. One of the more consistent clubs are surely Spurs.
Tottenham Hotspur have seldom messed around with the template too much and seldom put out a real stinker – but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened, and as they didn’t make our list of this season’s worst shirts, we thought it was only fair to find another way to dunk on some of their historic misfires – so here’s our rundown of the five worst shirts in Spurs’ recent history…
Spurs really haven’t had many bad home shirts, perhaps because even the dodgiest of designers can only do much damage with such a clean and simple kit concept – but Puma did manage to put out probably the worst home jersey of the Premier League era, largely by trying to get just a bit too clever.
Spurs have had yellow change strips for years and a few of their home tops have had a tasteful dash of it, but Puma went too far and yellowed this affair up just a bit too much, with the chunky side panels especially unpleasant to look at.
The lesson for future kit manufacturers is, perhaps, that yellow really only works on a Spurs top that’s also got a fair amount of black or dark blue to offset it. This isn’t that bad, and it’s a testament to Spurs’ shirt consistency over the years that it’s in our bottom five, but it’s still a pretty poor effort.
Over the years, Spurs have broadly stuck to a well-worn palette of blues and yellows for their away and third kits with pleasing results, but for some unknown reason they’ve also dipped their toes into brown a couple of times – and the recent 2023/24 effort provides some clues as to why it’s a shade that few teams want on their shirts.
There are worse shades of brown than this out there, but it’s not like fans were queuing around the block to buy a shirt the shade of a cheap latté with no collar and only a couple of tiny little specks of a paler beige – the creamer, presumably – to add anything resembling design flair.
The result was a Nike shirt which was drab, forgettable and not something anyone wanted to wander the streets of Tottenham in. It’s also the start of a theme in our little countdown – because recent Nike change strips absolutely dominate this list.
Speaking of which, the American outfitters were also responsible for this rather ludicrous effort, which seems to have been designed by somebody on a truly mind-bending melange of illicit substances.
If you take away that bizarre flash of pale green then it’s probably well on its way to being a perfectly nice kit, but while third kits can and should be a canvas for experimentation and jazziness, this is a perfect example of a kit throwing too many ideas, too many colours and too many patterns into the mix at the same time.
It’s a lunatic, psychedelic mess, with a hint of ‘light glistening off an oil slick’ and ‘pretentious art piece in student’s dormitory’ about it, all at the same time. Funnily enough, this was the same year in which Nike simultaneously released a completely plain white home kit with no trim or detailing whatsoever, as though this shirt vacuumed all of the energy for creativity or flair out of the room before they sat down to sort the other shirts out.
Let’s lay off Nike for all of five minutes and get some digs in on Under Armour instead, as we take in some visual evidence as to why they don’t get too many kit manufacturing gigs in professional football these days.
Spurs have had some lovely pale blue kits over the years, dating back to the heady days of the Holsten sponsorship, but this effort doesn’t even look like a football kit. It feels far more rugby league than anything else, or perhaps something worn by an especially low-budget T20 cricket franchise. It’s just not very… football. Or very Spurs.
The details just don’t sit right, either. There’s something irritating about the white band of sleeve trim inside the thicker black layer. The shape of the colouring around the collar is weird. It’s just a big pale blue bundle of not-rightness, a bad shirt pulled from a pile of rejected ideas for a Wycombe Wanderers re-brand.
Look, let’s be fair to Nike for five seconds. They have designed some nice Spurs shirts. We love the cosmic 2021/22 away kit with its artistic swirls that look like a Van Gogh painting. We were a big fan of last year’s retro graded blue change number. But when they miss, they blaze it over the bar, out of the stadium, over the car park, and into the Emirates down the road.
Purple, neon yellow and black is a pretty hard colour combo the pull off at the best of times, but this doesn’t even try very hard. It’s just blocks of clashing colours lobbed on top of each other with no thought given to how they might look. It’s ugly as all hell.
Was this kit cunningly designed to serve as a distraction tactic, putting opposing teams off by appalling their fundamental sense of taste? Did someone want to give the intern a go to encourage their development? And if so, did they get a full-time job afterwards? Why are the club crest and manufacturer’s logo centred and about half a millimetre apart? This is a shirt with no redeeming features.