The weird and fascinating origin stories of your favorite team’s soccer kits
Did you know that Brazil’s original jersey was deeply resented by its own fans after it lost to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final, leading to a redesign made by a teenager three years later?
Neither did I, until I went digging.
The stories behind the kits of legendary (and not-so-legendary) national teams is often weird, sometimes serendipitous, and occasionally built on legends that never quite happened the way everyone remembers.
As the World Cup 2026 steadily advances to its inevitable conclusion (my crystal ball says it will be Argentina winning it again), let’s look into how the teams now playing the Round of 16 knockouts got their kits… and discarded others.
Argentina vs.
Napoleon
Let’s start with Messi’s team.
Argentina debuted its first documented kit in 1902: plain white with a light blue horizontal band.
It wasn’t until 1908 or 1910 (depending on the source) that the team switched to the vertical sky-blue-and-white stripes that have defined the “Albiceleste” ever since.
The deeper roots of that pale blue go back much further though, to 1771, when Spanish King Charles III used the color for a royal honor connected to the Virgin Mary, a palette later adopted by Argentine revolutionaries resisting Napoleon’s grip on Spain in the early 1800s.
But it’s Argentina’s away kit that has the most bizarre story: In 1986, manager Carlos Bilardo worried the squad’s official heavy cotton away shirts would leave players exhausted in the Mexico City heat before their quarterfinal against England.
With no time to source a replacement through normal channels, staff bought cheap polyester shirts from a local sporting goods store, then spent the night before the match hand-stitching on crests and numbers.
Diego Maradona wore that improvised, store-bought shirt when he scored both the “Hand of God” and the “Goal of the Century” in the same game.
Brazil’s bad vibes
Brazil is already out of the tournament, destroyed by Erling Haaland and his Vikings history, but the team is marked by superstition, starting with its jerseys.
The team wore white until the 1950 World Cup final, where a home defeat to Uruguay was so devastating it became known as the “Maracanazo,” after the name of the stadium they played in, the legendary Maracaná.
The white shirt was permanently associated with the loss.
It was a national trauma, and many Brazilians turned against the color.
The rejection was widespread enough that in 1953, the newspaper “Correio da Manhã” ran a contest requiring a new design that used all four colors of the flag.
A 19-year-old illustrator named Aldyr Garcia Schlee won with the yellow shirt, green trim, and blue shorts still worn today.
It’s the yellow of the jersey that gave the team its nickname: the “canarinha” or “little canary,” like the yellow of that bird.
Brazil’s blue away kit has its own improvisational footnote, like Argentina’s.
At the 1958 final, both Brazil and host nation Sweden were set to wear yellow, and Brazil ended up needing an alternative on short notice.
With the white kit still considered unlucky, officials bought plain blue shirts from a shop in Stockholm the morning of the match.
According to team folklore, blue was chosen because it echoes the robes associated with Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil’s patron saint.
Staff sewed the crest onto the shirts by hand only hours before kickoff, and Brazil won its first World Cup wearing them.
Right: An illustration of England v Scotland at the Oval, ca. 1875.[Photo: Julian Finney/FIFA/Getty Images, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:England_v_Scotland_1879.png">Wiki Commons]
England’s cricket
England’s white shirt exists largely by accident, which is a curious fact since it’s the country that https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-history-of-football-in-england/">invented the sport.
For the country’s first official international match, against Scotland in 1872, the English side didn’t have a dedicated football kit and instead wore the white cricket uniforms already available to the players.
The look was never formally replaced.
England’s navy shorts were later chosen specifically to distinguish the kit from Germany’s all-white uniform, and the red away shirt, worn most famously during the 1966 World Cup win, comes from the red cross on the national flag.
Flags and revolutions
Portugal’s red and green tell a similarly political story: before 1910, the country’s colors were blue and white under the monarchy, but a republican revolution that year replaced the crown, and a new flag using green and red—colors already tied to Portugal’s republican movement since the 1890s—was formally adopted in 1911.
The football team took on this post-revolutionary palette when it formed in 1921.
Colombia wears yellow, blue, and red, colors that trace back to a single 1801 flag created by revolutionary Francisco de Miranda for the short-lived state of Gran Colombia.
July 4th, 2026. [Photo: Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images]
Paraguay’s red-and-white striped shirt developed alongside the Paraguayan Football Association, founded in Asunción on June 18, 1906, with the red stripes sometimes linked to the tierra colorada, the reddish clay soil found throughout the country.
The kit of Mexico (now out of the tournament) is the same as its 200-year-old flag, which on itself is the result of the peace treaty that followed its independence war from Spain.
Back in 1821, when the Plan of Iguala finally ended the fighting, whoever designed that flag wasn’t thinking about soccer at all, they were thinking about survival.
Each stripe had a job to do: green stood for independence, white for the Church, red for the fragile truce between Spanish loyalists and Mexican-born Creoles who’d just spent a decade trying to kill each other.
The Spanish kit is a direct translation of its flag, which has red as its dominant color.
Originally, that was not the country’s flag but its Navy’s flag.
From that came the team’s nickname, ‘La Furia Roja’ (The Red Fury), which took hold after the team’s physical performance at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics.
The phrase itself is older than the tournament—it echoes “la furia española,” a term used centuries earlier to describe Spanish troops during military campaigns in Flanders.
The Olympic run simply reattached that old phrase to a red shirt that already existed because of the flag.
In Africa, Morocco’s straight-up green and red, red base with green trim, borrowed directly off a flag anchored by the Alaouite dynasty, the same royal family that’s been running the show since the 1600s.
And Egypt’s red jersey, white shorts, and black socks combo wasn’t the first kit they played with.
Back in 1934, the year the Pharaohs became the first Arab and African team ever to qualify for a World Cup, they used a green long-sleeved shirt with a small red patch on the chest—the colors of Kingdom of Egypt’s flag.
That changed to the current tricolor kit in 1953, after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 deposed the king and took the Arab Liberation Flag.
Switzerland’s kit is also a direct translation of the flag, the flat red with the white cross that predates the country’s flag by centuries: Swiss soldiers began sewing white crosses onto their uniforms ahead of the Battle of Laupen in 1339 to identify friendly troops in the chaos of combat.
That battlefield practice eventually became the national flag and, later, their national football team’s jersey.
Right: Weston McKennie of the United States controls the ball during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Round Of 32 match between USA and Bosnia and Herzegovina at San Francisco Bay Area Stadium on July 1, 2026 in Santa Clara, California. [Photo: UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, Elysia Su/ISI Photos/ISI Photos/Getty Images]
U.S. soccer was a rarity when it started in the early 1900s, so the ragtag bunch of amateurs first who suit up for the national team just grabbed the flag and stapled it to a shirt.
You would imagine the same will be true to our northern neighbors but no, team Canada actually wore royal blue with a single red maple leaf on the chest in 1925, like the Canadian Red Ensign flag.
The country didn’t lock its red and white flag until 1965, which was the reason why its team changed its kit to the current one.
Born from a nickname
Right: Timothy Castagne of Belgium controls the ball during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group G match between New Zealand and Belgium at BC Place Vancouver on June 26, 2026 in Vancouver, British Columbia. [Photos: Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images, Emilee Chinn/Getty Images]
Belgium’s “Red Devils” nickname has a more specific origin than most people realize.
In 1906, journalist Pierre Walckiers described the Belgian team’s red-shirted, aggressive play in a match against the Netherlands, and borrowed the nickname from Camille Jenatzy, a Belgian racing driver known as “The Red Devil” for his fiery red beard and daredevil driving style.
The federation later built the kit identity around that borrowed nickname, anchoring it in an all-red jersey.