Mateo Kossmann believes designers like him live in the future. The Uruguayan is the Director of Federations at Adidas Football and is part of the team that creates apparel for all the international federations the company sponsors.
Speaking to ESPN over a video call from Germany, Kossmann says work on the recently-launched World Cup jerseys began three years ago. He laughs and talks about how they've already begun the process for kits slated for 2028.
Take a walk around the Adidas headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Kossmann says, and you'll find the Arsenal range for 2028 being discussed in one meeting room, and the technology for the 2030 World Cup in another. Walk further down and you'll see designers huddled around a 1994 Germany World Cup jersey that is to be re-launched.
The creation process is lengthy, and it's why he says the best moment of his job is the day the first samples of the home and away kits of all the nations arrive in the office.
"All the product managers, all the teams opening the boxes and checking the jersey out for the first time ... we call it Christmas because you really want to see how it comes to life," he says.
"You can imagine all these things, test things and see sample products or parts of the jersey materials and crest, but you see it all come together ... that's a pretty cool moment."
Today, a jersey has evolved far beyond a piece of clothing denoting fandom. Sport is just one of the many things a sports jersey stands for. Sportswear was one of the five fashion trends circular clothing marketplace Depop highlighted in its 2026 Trend Report. It detailed how especially in a World Cup year, jerseys have become a way of "signalling affiliation and cultural belonging."
The spread of World Cup fever often begins sartorially and a Depop representative told ESPN that there has been a 652% jump in searches for World Cup jerseys in the last five weeks, and a 26% increase in sales week over week.
"I think because World Cups are quite infrequent, it just means an incredible amount to people and you really sort of think back to where you were at that time. So I think a shirt from a specific World Cup ... for me it would be the England 1998 shirt which would be my first World Cup," author and journalist Joey D'Urso tells ESPN.
"It's just such an incredibly distinct memory. I was six years old, but it's completely seared onto my brain. I mean, I couldn't really tell you who my teacher was or who my classmates were that I saw every day, but that Michael Owen goal against Argentina, it's just so vivid."
D'Urso is the author of More Than A Shirt, a book that looks at how jerseys explain politics and power. He noted how jerseys take on further meaning if a team wins in them, and spoke of seeing replica kits of 2022 champions Argentina everywhere on a recent trip to the country.
Success begets sales. The long lines outside the Arsenal club shop in the aftermath of their Premier League win reflects that.
So beyond glory and childhood nostalgia, what are the makings of a good World Cup jersey?
D'Urso believes the answer lies in simplicity. "I think being creative but not too creative, you don't want to reinvent the wheel and particularly in a World Cup," he says.
"A Brazil jersey, you kind of want to know what it's going to look like and you can deviate from that a little bit, but don't try and be too clever almost, just sort of bold, clear design and colors."
The Brazil yellow is iconic and an indelible part of World Cup imagery. However, it was a kit that was born out of humiliation and happenstance.
"My favorite World Cup jersey story is from the 1950 World Cup and how Brazil played in white and they lost against Uruguay in the final, which was this completely devastating national trauma. And then they had a competition to design a new shirt and it was the yellow design that we all know so well came out of that," D'Urso narrates.
Superstition is yet to feature in Kossmann's design process at Adidas, and his answer to what elevates a World Cup jersey is two-pronged. From a player perspective, he believes it needs to allow them to perform at the highest level. So for example, to cope with the heat of North America this summer, he spoke of how Adidas' batch of jerseys have cooling technology to ensure they are breathable.
He believes for players the jersey is a tool, but for fans it's a symbol. It should be something that unites people.
"No matter if it's the grandma or the five-year-old kid, everybody watches the World Cup because it's a cultural celebration where everybody watches those games and everybody's part of it," he said.
"So the concepts and the stories you tell need to be very democratic, need to be very easy to understand, easy to grasp. If you go too complex, you're going to lose that connection."
It's why Adidas home kit designs don't veer too far from the flag colours. It's the away kits which allow for a deeper exploration of a country's culture and fabric. Curaçao are a case in point here. The Caribbean island is the smallest nation to ever take part in a World Cup and for their away kit, Kossmann said they wanted to break away from their usual colour palette and find an exciting new shade.
The end result was a light yellow shirt with elements inspired by the unique architecture of the capital city, Willemstad. The jersey proved an instant hit and jumped right to the top of nearly every pre-tournament kit ranking, including ESPN's.
You can be sure that Adidas will include the kit in its Bringback collection for the World Cup in 2050, as it has done for this edition with some of its popular kits from the past. Their retro collection, which went on sale a couple of weeks ago, features kits from the 1990s of countries like Spain, Germany, Sweden and Japan.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing but equally, so are the aesthetics of the 1990s. The bold colours and patterns have marked it out as one of football's most distinctive eras.
Drake Ramberg is a designer behind some of the iconic shirts of that period, including Arsenal's 1995-96 lightning bolt kit, Nigeria's 1996 Olympics top as well as Borussia Dortmund and Italy's. He spent 37 years at Nike in various roles before retiring in 2024. He still lives near the Nike headquarters in Oregon and continues to frequent the gym on their campus.
Ramberg believes the retro renaissance goes beyond just the cyclical nature of fashion.
"The '90s, people look back at them with a lot of fondness because of the graphics and colour and the boldness of it. But around mid '90s, I know Nike really was bringing performance fabrications to the industry and so Dri-FIT became the go-to material for the Nike jerseys and other brands, of course, were bringing more performance materials into their jerseys as well," he tells ESPN.
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"And with that, the prices of those fabrications were a lot more expensive than the previous iterations of just polyester jerseys. And I think also the market just kind of started getting cleaned up and became more about just beautiful fabrics, high performance, and less about jacquards and dimension welds and all-over-graphics and all that kind of stuff. So it just really cleaned up from mid '90s to 2010, 2015, for about 10-15 years.
Ramberg said Nigeria's 2018 World Cup kit was the turning point for when jerseys went back to telling a story. He spoke of how technology had progressed to a stage where you could produce high-performance material and also embed graphics in them.
The American designer has given multiple presentations on the formula behind making a successful jersey. A key point he underlines for designers is that a kit is a head to toe entity. The shirt drives the sales, but the shorts, socks and anthem jacket are just as important.
While the resurgence of 90s jerseys has highlighted the timelessness of his designs, Ramberg feels the landscape today is completely unrecognizable.
"In some ways it was like I was living in the shadows because before the internet we'd launch a new kit and it would be on the back page of the Sunday Times or in the World Soccer Magazine, you'd see some photos of it and there was no feedback loop from fans, from players maybe a little bit," he said.
"But you didn't have this whole era that we have today with the internet and social media and everybody's got an opinion."
The engagement from fans is in turn starting to shape the design process. "I think those stories were there in the past, but now we're making more of an effort to tell them," Kossmann says.
Argentina's 2026 kit tells the story of their World Cup pedigree; the three shades of blue from the jerseys of their three World Cups are hued together. Similarly, the prominence of the blue in Spain's home kit is a nod to their 2010 victory, where they won the final wearing a navy blue jersey.
"We create in such a way that our World Cup kits should represent football in 2026. I want people in 20, 30, 40 years to look back and be like, 'Wow, Adidas in '26 was cooking'" Kossmann said.
