13 Greatest Premier League Away Kits Ever Made

 

Ask someone to picture their club's shirt and they will describe the home kit: the colours that never change, the design the club is bound to. Ask them which shirt they actually loved most and, more often than not, they will name an away kit. That is not a coincidence. The away shirt is the one place in football design where a club is allowed to surprise you.

The Premier League has produced more collectable away kits than any league on earth. This is a ranking of the very best, judged on design, on the stories they carry, and on how well they have aged. Some won trophies. Some were worn by teams that finished mid-table and are loved anyway. That, too, is the point.

Why Away Kits Are Where the Magic Happens

A home shirt has almost no freedom. Arsenal play in red, Newcastle in black and white stripes, Everton in blue, and a designer who strays too far gets a furious fanbase for their trouble. The tradition is the point, and it is sacred.

The away kit carries none of that weight. Freed from the club's core colours, designers can experiment with palettes, patterns and ideas that would be unthinkable on a home shirt. That is why the boldest and most memorable designs in football almost always turn up on the road. It is also why away kits are made in smaller numbers, worn less often, and disappear from shops faster, which is the exact combination that makes them so collectable years later.

The 13 Greatest Premier League Away Kits

1. Arsenal 1992/93, the Bruised Banana (Adidas). The most famous away shirt in Premier League history, and arguably the most famous football shirt full stop. A yellow base covered in a jagged black zig-zag, finished with the old Adidas Trefoil. Nicknamed the Bruised Banana almost immediately, it was a figure of fun at first, and Arsenal finished tenth wearing it. Then the results were forgotten and the shirt was not. When Adidas revived it in 2019 the demand was enormous, though collectors always specify the original.

2. Manchester United 1990/92, the Snowflake (Adidas). Blue and white, with a tessellating geometric pattern everyone calls the snowflake, the Sharp sponsor and the Trefoil on the shoulders. United wore it to win the 1992 League Cup, and it was worn by the players who became the foundation of the club's decade of dominance. The pattern proved so durable that Adidas has reissued it more than once, most recently as a full collection. A design a manufacturer keeps returning to, decades later, is a design that earned its place.

3. Newcastle United 1995/96 away (Adidas). The home stripes of this era rightly get the glory, but the away kit deserves its own mention: maroon and blue horizontal hoops, a buttoned collar, the same Adidas craftsmanship. It was worn by the Entertainers, the Kevin Keegan side of Alan Shearer, David Ginola and Les Ferdinand that played thrilling football and came agonisingly close to a title. The team never won the league. The shirt won a kind of immortality anyway.

4. Manchester City 1993/94 away (Umbro). Purple, white and yellow, in a combination that has no business working and absolutely does. City were nowhere near the force they would later become, but this shirt has become one of the most celebrated away kits in Premier League history purely on the strength of its design. No trophy, no legendary side, just brave colour theory executed without fear, and remembered thirty years on.

5. Norwich City 1994/96 away (Ribero). If any shirt proves the away-kit rule, it is this one. A white base with wildly marbled purple sleeves, worn by a mid-table Norwich side, and completely unforgettable. It looks like nothing else before or since. This is exactly the kind of fearless change shirt that a home kit would never allow, and it has a devoted collector following to this day.

6. Everton 1994/96 away (Umbro). A bright yellow base with a blue zig-zag graphic and the NEC sponsor. Everton's home blue is a fixed point, so the away shirt was where Umbro could play, and they produced a genuine cult classic. Bold, of its time, and beloved by a generation of Everton supporters.

7. Leicester City away, the Walkers era (Le Coq Sportif). Yellow with the fox crest and the iconic Walkers Crisps sponsor, a partnership so local and so distinctive that the shirt is inseparable from it. Proof that a great sponsor can lift a good away kit into a memorable one.

8. Liverpool away, the Carlsberg years (Reebok). Liverpool produced several strong change shirts during the long Carlsberg sponsorship, including a striking yellow and navy away. Away from the fixed red of Anfield, the club's away kits of this era gave designers room to work, and collectors have long rated them.

9. Manchester United 1994/96 away (Umbro). The black and gold Umbro away, worn in the mid-90s at the peak of United's powers. A sharp, confident design that has aged beautifully and is a staple of any serious collection of the era.

10. Manchester City away, the Thomas Cook era (Le Coq Sportif). A bold orange and navy change shirt from the mid-2000s, another City away that leaned into an unexpected colour and made it work. A cult favourite among City collectors.

11. Arsenal 2022/23 away (Adidas). A modern entry that understands its own history. A navy base with diagonal lightning-bolt detailing, deliberately echoing Arsenal's famous 1990s blue away shirt, and loved for it. The clearest sign of the heritage wave that dominates kit design now.

12. Tottenham 2017/18 away (Nike). A clean navy design with the shield crest, worn as Spurs established themselves among Europe's elite. Understated where others are loud, and a reminder that restraint ages as well as boldness.

13. Leicester, Norwich and the cult-shirt tradition. The final place goes to the whole category these clubs represent: the mid-table away shirt that outshone the giants. The Premier League's away-kit history is not only about the big six, and some of its most loved change shirts came from clubs that never won a thing.

Honourable Mentions

A list like this leaves good shirts out by necessity. West Ham have produced several strong away kits in claret and blue variations. Nottingham Forest's change shirts carry the weight of the club's European history. Aston Villa's claret and blue travels well onto an away design. And almost every club has one away shirt, usually from the 90s, that its own supporters would argue belongs here. That is the nature of away kits: the affection is deeply personal, which is exactly why they last.

The away shirt is the one a club lets its designers be brave with. That is why, years later, it is so often the away kit people want to own, not the home one they were supposed to love.

- Jamie King, co-founder, Mystery Jersey King

Collecting Away Kits

Away kits reward the patient collector for a simple reason of supply. Clubs produce fewer of them than home shirts, they sell through faster, and they are rarely restocked once a season ends. A home shirt from a major club stays findable for years. The equivalent away shirt, in good condition, becomes a genuine hunt far sooner.

That makes authenticity the thing to get right, because the scarcer and more sought-after a shirt is, the more convincing the fakes become. If you are buying a vintage away shirt second-hand, our guide on how to tell if a retro football shirt is authentic is worth reading first. For the wider picture of which classic shirts matter and why, the most iconic Premier League shirts from 1992 to today covers home and away across every era, and the best retro football shirts of all time goes wider still.

Owning One

The classic away shirts in this list surface through specialist and vintage sellers, and the retro football shirts collection is where to start looking. Condition and authenticity matter more with away kits than almost anything else, so buy from sellers who guarantee both.

The other way in is not to choose at all. An MJK mystery box sends one genuine football shirt without you knowing which one is coming: any club, any nation, any era, drawn from a supply network that spans more than 50 leagues and 53 countries. Away kits turn up in the mix regularly, and given that the whole argument of this list is that the best shirts are the ones you did not expect, there is a certain logic to letting the box decide.

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