Carabao Cup Fourth Round: The Ties and the Shirts to Know

The fourth round of the Carabao Cup has a bit of everything: the holders at home, two Premier League heavyweights meeting early, a League Two side hosting Arsenal and a few ties between clubs with colours that make shirt collectors smile. The ties are played the week commencing 26 October, so check the EFL site for exact dates and kick-off times as they are confirmed.

This guide lists every tie and then goes through them one by one, with the club identity behind each pairing: where the colours came from, how a nickname started and what each club has done in this competition. It is a shirt company's view of the cup, so the focus is on the stories that end up woven into a shirt.

The Eight Ties at a Glance

The home side is listed first. The winners go into the quarter-finals in December.

The Shirts and Stories Behind the Ties

Liverpool v Chelsea

Red against blue, and the tie most neutrals will circle first. Liverpool are the most successful club in the history of this competition with ten League Cup wins, including 2022 and 2024, while Chelsea have won it five times. An all-red shirt against royal blue is about as easy to picture as English football gets, and shirts from both clubs are collected all over the world.

Fleetwood Town v Arsenal

A League Two side hosting one of the Premier League's biggest names is what the cup is for, and Fleetwood are the only League Two club left in the competition at this stage. The current club was formed in 1997 as Fleetwood Wanderers, although football in the Lancashire fishing town goes back much further. Fleetwood play in red shirts with white sleeves at Highbury Stadium, which holds 5,327, and their nicknames, the Fishermen and the Cod Army, tell you where they are from. Their biggest day came at Wembley in May 2014, when they beat Burton Albion 1-0 in the League Two play-off final to win promotion.

Arsenal arrive as beaten finalists, since Manchester City beat them in the 2026 final. Their red body with white sleeves is among the most recognisable designs in English football, and as Fleetwood's shirts are red with white sleeves too, one of the sides will probably need a change strip.

Manchester City v Brighton & Hove Albion

The holders are at home. City won the 2026 final against Arsenal, and they have nine League Cup titles in total, second only to Liverpool. They reached this round in style, beating Norwich 5-0 in the third round on 17 September. Sky blue against blue and white stripes is a clean contrast, since Brighton's stripes and City's plain sky blue are two of the most distinctive looks in the division.

Everton v Newcastle United

Royal blue against black and white stripes. Newcastle won this competition in 2025, so they arrive as a former winner of the trophy, and both clubs have long traditions and loyal support. Their colours barely change from one decade to the next, which means it is the sponsors, collars and badges that date an Everton or Newcastle shirt, and that is what keeps collectors looking closely at the details.

Sunderland v Brentford

Two sides in red and white stripes, so a kit clash is almost guaranteed, and one of them will wear something different. Sunderland adopted the stripes in the 1887/88 season and have worn them ever since, while Brentford have worn red and white stripes with black shorts as their main kit since 1925/26, with a single failed experiment in yellow and blue in 1960/61.

The nicknames are better stories than the shirts. Sunderland's Black Cats became official in a public vote in 2000, but photographs show players holding a black cat that lived at Roker Park in the 1900s and 1910s. Brentford's Bees began as a mistake: in 1894/95 a group from Borough Road College came to cheer on their friend Joseph Gettins, who was playing for the club, and their chant of "Buck up Bs!" was misheard by the press as "Buck up bees!". Sunderland have reached the League Cup final twice, in 1985 and 2014, and lost both, while Brentford were founded on 10 October 1889.

Bradford City v Peterborough United

This is the tie for people who love an underdog shirt. Bradford City are, as far as we know, the only professional club in England to wear claret and amber, colours inherited from Manningham Rugby Club, and black has been added to the kit in memory of the 56 supporters who died in the 1985 stadium fire. The club was founded in 1903, and in 2013 it became the first fourth-tier side to reach the League Cup final since Rochdale in 1962, beating three Premier League sides on the way before losing 5-0 to Swansea at Wembley.

Peterborough United, founded in 1934, are known as The Posh, a nickname that dates from 1921, when a manager at Fletton United went looking for "posh players for a posh new team". It started as a piece of mockery and became the club's identity. Shirts from clubs like these are often the most characterful in a collection, because the story is so specific to the place.

Fulham v Crystal Palace

A London derby of the cup kind. Fulham have worn a white shirt and black shorts since 1896, the year they moved into Craven Cottage, and they are nicknamed the Cottagers after it. They also have a place in shirt history: Fulham's 2002/03 deal with Betfair was the first gambling sponsorship in English football, which is part of the story in our guide to the Premier League gambling sponsor ban.

Crystal Palace's red and blue stripes feel as if they have always been there, but they only date from 1973, when manager Malcolm Allison gave the club a complete makeover. The stripes are said to have been inspired by Barcelona, and the Eagles nickname, which replaced the old Glaziers, was borrowed from Benfica. Before that Palace wore claret and blue, influenced by an Aston Villa employee who was instrumental in forming the professional club in 1905.

Bournemouth v Aston Villa

Red and black stripes against claret and blue. Bournemouth's red and black dates from 1971 and was based on the AC Milan shirt, and before that they wore red and white stripes. The Cherries' name is said to come either from cherry-red stripes or from the cherry trees on the estate next to Dean Court, where the club has played since 1910. They finished sixth in the Premier League in 2025/26, their highest league finish, which took them into European football for the first time.

Aston Villa have five League Cup wins, and their claret and blue is one of the most distinctive pairings in English football. As Palace's early story shows, those colours once travelled to south London.

Cup nights are when shirts become memories. Lots of the shirts we love most are tied to one big match someone remembers.

- Jamie King, co-founder, Mystery Jersey King

The Road to Wembley

All 92 clubs in the Premier League and the EFL enter the competition. The 2026/27 third round was played between 8 and 17 September, and the draw for this round was made on 16 September. The path from here is short:

Wembley has hosted the final since 1967, and the competition has carried the Carabao name since 2017, with the sponsorship running to 2029. The most successful clubs are Liverpool with ten wins, Manchester City with nine, Manchester United with six and Chelsea and Aston Villa with five each. Recent winners are Newcastle in 2025, Liverpool in 2024, Manchester United in 2023, Liverpool in 2022 and Manchester City in 2021.

Collecting Cup Memories

Many collectors keep a shirt because of a single match: a cup upset, a famous night, a first game at a ground. If you want to build a collection around moments like that, these are the things worth knowing.

• Start with a story, not a club. A shirt tied to a night you remember will mean more than one chosen for its label.
• Smaller clubs make great shirts. Bradford's claret and amber or Fleetwood's red and white are shirts nobody else on your street will have.
• Sponsors date a shirt. Names like Candy, NEC or Thomas Cook pin a shirt to a particular era, and some sponsor stories are worth collecting for their own sake, as in our guide to the Premier League gambling sponsor ban.
• Keep the cup connection. A match programme or ticket stub kept with the shirt turns a garment into a memory.
• Check it is the real thing. Our guides to how manufacturers mark a genuine shirt and the most faked football shirts explain what to look for.

For more ideas, see our 15 tips to cultivate your football shirt collection, our list of the best retro football shirts of all time and the best Premier League home kits of all time.

For a chosen era, browse the retro football shirts collection. For a surprise, our mystery football shirt box delivers one genuine shirt, with the club chosen for you. Discover our mystery football shirts to see how it works.

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