Arsenal: Holy hell those Adidas kits

Leaked photos of Arsenal’s latest Adidas kit for the 2019/20 season surfaced this week. I am not usually bothered by these things, but holy hell…

Who does not love a good football kit? The 2002 Italy Kappa shirts were always my favourite as a kid. And now, as an adult, I love wandering down to the Classic Football Shirts factory in Manchester and waltzing through the aisles of classic shirts from all sorts of weird and wonderful places and eras.

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Everyone can remember their favourite football kits. But for Arsenal, they have never had the nicest of kits. There was a white third away kit with pinstripes from around 2010 that was delicious, but really, that is about it.

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And that has been an ever more pertinent problem in recent years. The Gunners signed a five-year kit deal with Puma in 2014. Sadly, ever since that time, the quality and design of the kits have deteriorated significantly. I bought the 2016 home shirt and the ‘Fly Emirates’ sponsorship on the front started to fall off after just a couple of washes. But this year, the dreaded Puma deal is coming to an end. Arsenal, from the 2019/20 season, will be with Adidas.

Praise the Lord for that decision. Not only will it see a major increase in the revenue made from the new kit deal that will see them pocket £300 million across five years, which is almost double the figure earned from the Puma deal signed in 2014. It is the first time Arsenal will have an Adidas kit since 1994 when they moved to Nike for 20 years until signing with Puma.

https://twitter.com/afcstuff/status/1131265657432084480

There have been plenty of leaks regarding potential designs, with the famous ‘bruised banana’ yellow fade rumoured to be returned, and this week, we finally got an unofficial sneak peek at what Adidas have made, and my word, they are absolutely beautiful (you can see them above, modelled by Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Alexandre Lacazette).

The away kit has garnered the most attention on social media, and understandably so as it does pay homage to the ‘bruised banana’ kits of 1986, but it is the home kit that I think is a really impressive design. Because of the colour restrictions, it is more difficult to design a beautiful home kit. But my gosh Adidas have done precisely that.

I do not buy many football kits anymore, at least not new releases. But I think many Arsenal fans and I will be digging deep into their pockets to buy these. They are absolutely stunning.

So be thankful for the end of the Puma era. The Adidas era is here. If their initial work is anything to go by, long may it continue.