10 stunning football shirts that flew under the radar

Every season, a handful of shirts steal the spotlight while others quietly slip past without a second glance. Not every classic needs a trophy-winning campaign or a global marketing push to earn its place in the history books. Some shirts were simply ahead of their time, overshadowed by a bigger release, or worn by a team nobody was watching. Here are 10 stunning football shirts that went under the radar, and why each one deserves a second look.

2016 was a big year for Club América. Las Águilas celebrated their centenary, and they arrived on the back of a second straight CONCACAF Champions League title, beating Tigres 4-1 on aggregate in the final. The 2016-17 season also took them to the Club World Cup and to the Apertura final against Tigres, with Oribe Peralta, Rubens Sambueza and goalkeeper Moisés Muñoz leading the way.

The away shirt was part of the centenary set. Nike’s design is a graphic tribute to Estadio Azteca, the club’s home ground, which turned 50 that year. It is a dark red kit with “Centenario de Leyenda 1916-2016” above the badge, a small detail that makes it a proper collector’s piece.

So why did it fly under the radar? It had to share the spotlight with the centenary home shirt, which was the headline release. The green third kit followed in January 2017. And as with a lot of Liga MX kits, it never got the same global attention as European releases, even though the story behind it is one of the best of the decade.

Juventus were the giants of Italian football in 2019/20. They went into the season as Serie A champions for eight years in a row, with Cristiano Ronaldo, Paulo Dybala and Miralem Pjanić leading a squad that had a new coach in Maurizio Sarri. It was a season full of talking points on the pitch, and just as many off it, thanks to a very different look for the club.

That’s where the third shirt comes in. Released on 6 August 2019, it was the club’s first blue shirt since 2016/17. Adidas gave it a bright “Unity Blue” base with silver details, including the crest, shoulder stripes and a silver-trimmed collar. The standout feature is the all-over camouflage-style graphic, embossed into the body, collar and sleeves, which shimmers under stadium lights. It is also made from recycled polyester and linked in design to the away shirt that season.

The home shirt took all the attention. Juve had ditched their famous vertical stripes for a half-black, half-white design split by a pink line, and that caused a huge stir two months before the third shirt arrived. By comparison, the third kit felt like an afterthought, and Sports Illustrated even called its launch uninspiring. It was also mainly intended for the Champions League, so it was only worn in a handful of matches. And the camouflage print divided opinion from the very start. Look at it again now, and you’ll find a shimmering and unusual blue shirt from one of the most talked-about Juventus seasons in recent years.

Saint-Étienne is a club built on legends and history. They have won ten league titles, and the green shirts of the 1970s are known all over the world. The 2005/06 season was a much quieter chapter. After a sixth-place finish the year before, Les Verts ended the campaign in 13th place in Ligue 1 under coach Élie Baup, with 11 wins, 14 draws and 13 defeats. There were still highlights, including a 3-0 win over Paris Saint-Germain at the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard.

The squad was a mix of experience and young talent. Frédéric Piquionne was the top scorer, Pascal Feindouno provided the creativity, and Didier Zokora anchored the midfield. Look further down the squad sheet and you’ll find a teenage Bafétimbi Gomis and a young Loïc Perrin, who would later become a club legend.

The shirt itself is a clean Adidas design in green and white with Konica Minolta as sponsor. There is no flashy graphic here, just a simple, classic look that suits the history of the club. So why did it go under the radar? A mid-table season, a plain template from Adidas, and financially difficult year for the club. It’s a shirt that was never hyped, which is exactly why it’s worth finding now.

Not every great shirt comes from a famous club. PSKC Cimahi plays in Liga 2, the second tier of Indonesian football, in the city of Cimahi in West Java. For 2023/24 the club worked with Indonesian brand Calma, and the third shirt is the one everyone remembers.

The design is a graphic landscape in orange, black and white: a river winding through the scene, mountains rising behind it and a bright orange sun over the top. The landscape is based on Tangkuban Perahu, the stratovolcano that towers over the region around Cimahi and Bandung. It is an unusual shirt in a good way, showing off the place the club comes from rather than copying a standard template.

So why did it fly under the radar? It’s a third shirt in the second division of a league that very few collectors outside Indonesia follow. Calma supplied the club for only one season before the club moved on to a new deal, so the shirt had a short life. Even so, it holds a rating of around 4 out of 5 on Football Kit Archive from over a hundred votes, higher than most lower-league kits. It’s proof that a shirt doesn’t need a big club behind it to be beautiful. Despite Calma producing a large number of these shirts, it never got sold out and did not live up to the hype.

The 2016/17 season was a strange one for Barcelona. Under Luis Enrique, in his final year at the club, they still scored a huge number of goals, with Lionel Messi alone netting 54 in all competitions. But the big prizes slipped away. Real Madrid took LaLiga by three points, and in the Champions League Barça were knocked out by Juventus in the quarter-finals (0-3 away, 0-0 at the Camp Nou), just weeks after their famous comeback against PSG. The Supercopa and a third straight Copa del Rey were the consolation.

Against that backdrop, the third shirt barely got a moment. Nike’s design uses two tones of green, a teal and a “glow green” mint, with horizontal lines that get thinner towards the waist to create a gradient effect, plus a black side stripe. It was designed to stand out under floodlights, and it nods to the teal away shirts Barça wore in the 1990s. In other words, it is one of the boldest Barca kits of the decade.

Yet it arrived late. Barcelona were among the last clubs to reveal their kit for the 2016/17 season, and the third shirt made its debut only in a Champions League group game away at Borussia Mönchengladbach, two months after the home and away kits. Add a campaign without the major trophies and very few matches in this shirt, and you get a kit that quietly slipped by.

Feyenoord’s 2024/25 season had plenty of highs. The team won the Johan Cruijff Shield, reached the knockout stages of the Champions League, and finished third in the Eredivisie, with Igor Paixão as top scorer with 16 goals. Quinten Timber wore the captain armband.

For this fourth shirt, Castore looked at the place where every Feyenoord player starts a match: the players’ tunnel at De Kuip. The design is a tribute to its hand-painted walls, with a golden-yellow base, a tonal marble-style pattern and geometric shapes. Black on the collar, crest and sponsor logos keeps it sharp.

The club clearly knew it was something special. When the shirt launched on 6 December 2024, fans who bought one at the Feyenoord Fanshop could walk through the real tunnel in their new shirt and take a picture there. So why wasn't this shirt that popular? It arrived in December, well after the season’s other kits, and fourth shirts rarely get the attention of a home or away release. A bold, art-inspired design in a colour that has nothing to do with Feyenoord’s usual look made it easy to miss, but it’s a great piece of history from De Kuip, one of Europe's most iconic stadiums.

Few kits have made more noise before a ball was kicked. Belgium’s 2022 away shirt was the result of a collaboration between Adidas, the Belgian FA and Tomorrowland, the huge electronic music festival held in Boom, Flanders. The design is predominantly white, with vibrant multicoloured trim on the collar, sleeves, hem and underarms. It even has a multicoloured Adidas logo, which FourFourTwo called something it had never seen on a football shirt before. The word “Love” sits inside the collar, a nod to the festival.

Then came Qatar. Days before Belgium’s World Cup opener against Canada, FIFA rejected the shirt because of the word “Love” in combination with the rainbow-coloured trim. This came in the middle of the One Love armband row, though reports also described it as a commercial dispute, since the word was seen as a promotion for Tomorrowland. Belgium’s spokesperson confirmed the team would play in their red home shirt for the first three games. The matching multicoloured pre-match warm-up shirt was banned as well, even though UEFA had allowed both.

As a result, the shirt was barely seen where it was meant to shine. Eden Hazard did wear it in a friendly against Egypt in Kuwait just before the tournament, and fans could still buy the shirt, along with some colourful fan shorts that Adidas openly said did not comply with the rules. It’s a shame, because the shirt itself deserves more credit. FourFourTwo even called it one of the nicest white shirts of the entire tournament, a clean and restrained design with bright splashes of colour. Remembered for a controversy, but never really seen.

The 2010/11 season was a new chapter for Lyon. After eight years with Umbro, the club switched to Adidas under a 10-year deal, and the first season in the new kits was anything but smooth. Les Gones started the campaign dangerously close to the relegation places in September, then recovered to finish third in Ligue 1. The squad was built around captain Cris, the attacking talent of Lisandro López and the emergence of homegrown midfielder Maxime Gonalons.

This training shirt is a quiet gem from that first Adidas collection. It comes in a deep dark red with beige accents and a flower-like graphic at the bottom left, a small detail that gives it a lot of character. Understated and a little unexpected, it feels more like a lifestyle/streetwear piece than a typical training top.

It never had much of a chance to shine, though. The same season, Lyon released an away shirt in claret with a purple and pink pattern and gold trim, which grabbed all the headlines and is still the shirt most people remember from that year. Being in a similar colour family didn’t help the training shirt either, as it was easy to mistake for the away kit’s little brother. And as a training shirt, it was never worn in an official match, so it never got the TV moments that make a kit memorable, which is exactly why it’s worth finding now. It’s a clean, wearable shirt from the start of a new era at Lyon.

France arrived in Qatar as defending world champions and played like it. Les Bleus battled all the way to the final, where they lost to Argentina in one of the most dramatic World Cup finals ever. Throughout the tournament, one shirt stayed in the bag: the away kit.

That is a shame, because it’s one of the most interesting World Cup shirts of 2022. Nike launched it on 15 September 2022 alongside the navy home shirt, under the theme “France Nouveau”, combining the country’s heritage and future. The design draws on Toile de Jouy, a classic French fabric print, and fills a white shirt with illustrations of French icons: the cockerel, the Arc de Triomphe, the Clairefontaine football centre, windmills and scenes from the 1789 French Revolution. The French flag colours appear at the bottom left and right, and the crest and Swoosh are in royal blue. FourFourTwo called it a shirt with hidden layers that reveal themselves over time.

So why did it stay under the radar? France never needed it. Under the tournament’s kit rules, an away shirt is only used when there is a colour clash, and none of France’s opponents forced one. The shirt therefore stayed unseen during a World Cup where it could have had a global stage, all the way to the final. For a shirt that celebrates French history, it’s a funny twist of fate that it never got to write its own part in it.

Giresunspor is the kind of club that rarely makes global headlines. The green-and-white side from the Black Sea coast won the TFF 1. Lig to reach the Süper Lig, and 2022/23 was their second consecutive season in the Turkish top flight. Hakan Keleş was sacked in May with the team in 16th place and six games left, and Irfan Buz took over for the final stretch, but the club could not avoid relegation.

It was also the first season of a new kit deal. After a year with Nike, Giresunspor went back to Diadora, who supplied the club until 2025. The shirt comes with two green sides, divided by the city's famous river. On the right side of the shirt, you will find a map of the city, combined with some history and small paintings. It also has the iconic Turkish ''Aksa'' sponsor on the upper back.

So why is it underrated? A relegation season and a smaller club in a league that most collectors outside Turkey don’t follow meant the shirt got very little attention. Football Kit Archive shows just 100 votes for it, far fewer than some of the club's home shirts, which have well over 200. It’s a shirt that very few people have actually seen, which makes it a fun find for anyone who loves the less obvious corners of football.

What do these 10 shirts have in common? Almost nothing, and that is exactly the point. Some were hidden behind a louder home or away kit, some were never worn in a big match, and others came from clubs and leagues most people never look at. One was rejected by FIFA, one was never needed on the biggest stage, and one belongs to a club in Indonesia’s second tier. Yet each of them has a story and a design worth remembering.

A great football shirt doesn’t need a trophy, a famous player or a huge launch campaign. Sometimes it just needs someone to look twice. Chances are you’ll now see a few of these in a different light, and next time a shirt gets overlooked, you might wonder what is hiding behind it. Which of these 10 was your favourite? Let us know, and keep an eye out for the next shirt that flies under the radar.