With less than three months until the opening game of the 2022 FIFA World Cup at the Al-Bayt Stadium in Qatar, both Adidas and Puma have released a raft of new kits for the various national teams they supply including potential contenders for the trophy like Argentina and Germany.
Puma in particular have caused a bit of a storm with their insistence on sticking with a over-arching concept for all of their alternate jerseys, with the 2022 away template seeing a strange “halo” added around the number on the front of each jersey which has a thematic link with the nation in question.
Unfortunately, this has led to a homogenous set of shirts that are proving about as popular as the European club third kits released last year that saw Puma “break down the conventions of football shirt composition” by removing the crests and replacing them with large bands of text across the midriff.
Have they learned any valuable lessons with this new slew of World Cup away uniforms? It would appear not — though it’s fair to say that some of the new kits are better than others.
Here we run through the plethora of new World Cup kits released by Adidas and Puma this week, along with a brief breakdown of each individual design and a no-nonsense “hit” or “miss” rating.
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