The best football kits of the 1970s arrived at the exact moment colour television did, and that timing changed shirt design forever. Suddenly a kit was not just something a team wore, it was something millions of people saw in full colour on a Sunday afternoon, and designers started paying attention.
Why the best football kits of the 1970s still matter
The seventies were the hinge decade. Before it, kits were plain cotton shirts made in small runs by whoever the club used locally. After it, they were branded products with logos, stripes and a retail price. Almost every design language we take for granted now, from manufacturer branding on the chest to the idea of a third kit, was worked out somewhere between 1970 and 1979.
That is also why so much of our classic jerseys range leans on this decade. The templates were simple, the colours were bold, and nobody had yet discovered the sublimated patterns that would take over in the nineties.
Brazil 1970: the shirt colour TV made famous
Mexico 1970 was the first World Cup broadcast in colour to a global audience, and Brazil turned up in canary yellow with green trim and blue shorts. The shirt itself was made by Athleta, a Brazilian brand, and carried no manufacturer logo at all, just the CBD crest with its two stars.
What makes it one of the best football kits of the 1970s is not complexity. It is a plain yellow shirt with a green V-neck. But paired with Pele, Jairzinho and Carlos Alberto, and beamed into living rooms in colour for the first time, it became the single most recognisable football shirt on earth. If you want a modern take, the Brazil jersey collection still uses that same yellow-and-green formula, and the wider South America range shows how much the continent borrowed from it.
Netherlands 1974: orange, Total Football and two stripes
Adidas kitted out the Dutch for West Germany 1974, and the result is a design people still argue is the best ever made. Bright orange, black three-stripe sleeves, a simple lion crest.
The famous detail is Johan Cruyff’s shirt. Cruyff had a personal boot deal with Puma and refused to wear Adidas branding, so his shirt was made with two stripes on the sleeve instead of three. You can spot it clearly in footage from that tournament, and it remains one of the best small stories in kit history. The rest of the squad wore the standard three.
Peru 1970: the red sash everyone still copies
Peru’s white shirt with a red diagonal sash is proof that a single idea, executed cleanly, beats a dozen. It appeared at Mexico 1970 with Teofilo Cubillas running the show, and again in 1978.
The sash design is now so associated with Peru that River Plate, Rayo Vallecano and a dozen others get compared to it rather than the other way round. It is the rare seventies design that has never needed updating.
Admiral, Leeds United and the birth of the replica shirt
Here is the commercial story that matters. In 1973 Admiral signed Leeds United and started putting its own logo on the shirt, then sold copies to supporters. Before that, replica kits were barely a business. Leeds in all white with Admiral trim and the smiley sock tags is the moment fan shirts became a product.
Admiral then landed England in 1974, giving the national team its first shirt with a manufacturer’s branding and those red and blue shoulder flashes. Purists hated it. It sold enormously. Every England jersey since owes something to that deal, and every shirt in our club teams and Premier League collections exists because Admiral proved fans would buy them.
Sponsorship followed fast. Kettering Town put Kettering Tyres on their shirts in 1976 and were ordered to remove it by the FA. By 1979 Liverpool had Hitachi on the front, and the argument was over.
Argentina 1978: light blue stripes at a home World Cup
Adidas produced the Argentina kit for 1978, and it is deceptively simple: pale blue and white vertical stripes, black shorts, three stripes down the sleeve. Mario Kempes scoring in it, with ticker tape falling across the pitch in Buenos Aires, is one of the enduring images of the decade.
The albiceleste template has barely changed in fifty years, which tells you how right they got it. The current Argentina jersey is recognisably the same shirt with better fabric.
The oddities: Zaire, Coventry brown and borrowed shirts
Not every seventies kit was a masterpiece, and the strange ones are half the fun.
Zaire 1974
Zaire became the first sub-Saharan African side at a World Cup wearing green with a leopard on the crest. The results were rough, but the shirt is a genuine collector’s piece.
Coventry City 1978
Talbot-sponsored chocolate brown, top to bottom. It is regularly voted among the worst kits ever made, and it is now weirdly beloved for exactly that reason.
France’s borrowed green stripes
At the 1978 World Cup, France and Hungary turned up to the same match both in white. Neither had a change kit to hand, so France played in green and white striped shirts borrowed from local club Kimberley. Modern clash rules exist because of afternoons like that. You can see how far the France jersey has come since.
What 1970s kits were actually made of
If you have ever handled an original, the first thing you notice is weight. Early seventies shirts were heavy cotton or a cotton-polyester mix that soaked up rain and doubled in weight by full time. Collars were long and pointed early in the decade, then softened into V-necks and simple round necks by 1978.
Numbers were usually flock or felt, applied by hand, and they cracked. Names on the back were not standard in domestic football at all, which is why genuine seventies shirts look so clean compared to a modern one. If you are shopping vintage-inspired kits, that plainness is the tell for a good reproduction.
Buying 1970s-inspired jerseys today
Retro reissues have become a permanent part of the market, and the best of them keep the boxy cut and the simple crest rather than modernising everything. Look for a straight hem, a wider body and a crest that matches the era rather than the current badge.
Sizing is the thing people get wrong. Seventies cuts were roomy through the chest and short in the body, so a retro shirt often fits very differently from a current one. Our FAQ page covers fit and delivery, and you can read more about how we source shirts on our about us page.
For historical background on the tournaments themselves, the official FIFA archive for Mexico 1970 is worth an hour of anyone’s time.
Shop the collections
The decade’s influence runs right through the modern game. Browse our World Cup 2026 jerseys hub to see which nations are still working from a seventies blueprint, or dig into the national teams range for the full list.
European heritage sides are well covered in our Europe collection, including the Germany jersey that traces back to Beckenbauer’s 1974 winners, the Italy jersey in that unmistakable azzurro, the Spain jersey, the Portugal jersey and the Belgium jersey. Across the Atlantic, the Mexico jersey collection and the wider North and Central America range cover the 1970 hosts and their neighbours, while La Liga and MLS round out the club side.
The best football kits of the 1970s were made by people working with two colours and a sewing machine. Half a century later, most of them still look better than what we get now.
