Catwalk Time: Ranking Reading’s 21st Century Home Kits (Part One)
With a new home kit out, Alex thought it was time to rank all the designs we’ve seen in the last quarter of a century or so.
It’s that time of the year again: we’ve had a new Reading kit bestowed upon us, giving us a decision to make about whether to part with some of our precious, hard-earned pennies to add the latest offering to the collection.
Perhaps, if truth be told, the excitement of kit releases has worn off somewhat over the years as pretty much all teams release a new one each season to swell the coffers, departing from ye olden days when kit releases were every two seasons.
Did you know that we haven’t always played in the hoops though? We´ve had spells when we’ve alternated between different styles, but Sir John Madejski oversaw the reintroduction of the hoops in 1992 and they have remained a constant ever since.
However, I’m going to look past that because I like a Reading kit, and the good folks at the suppliers who provide variation upon variation of a pretty-difficult-to-add-variety-to blue-and-white-hoops design always bring a little excitement for me to see what new efforts they have concocted.
Right then: let’s get our vogue on and talk a walk down the catwalk to revisit some of efforts from the days gone by, putting them into some semblance of an order of which home kits were best and which were worst.
Please bear in mind that I am not the second coming of Yves Saint Laurent (more like Yves Saint You’re-Wrong), so this is all just an opinion piece done in the vein of humour by a man whose dress style could never knowingly have been called fashionable, and essentially boils down to a scratch-and-sniff policy through the piles of what is available to decide what to wear. Please feel to tell me how wrong I am in the comments section!
The range I have chosen includes any home kit that has been worn since the turn of the century, so the 1999-2001 effort will be included, but unfortunately some delightful ones before that will miss out. Counting from worst to best, here we go, fashionistas:
24th: 2014/15
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Waitrose
I just don’t know what Puma were thinking here. It quite literally looks like they forgot that they were supposed to make a kit for Reading and found a surplus of white rugby shirts in the back of a warehouse somewhere and proceeded to glue on some blue stripes.
None of this works. The rugby kit design, the long white plain white sleeves, the different-sized strips, the horrible collar that isn’t really a collar and the buttons. Football shirts don’t need buttons!
Also, I have no idea what the vertical red lines on the side of the shirt are doing there or what they were intended to do, but they just resemble when the office printer is running out of toner. Just awful.
23rd: 2017/18
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Carabao
Another awful Puma design. It’s a shame really because earlier iterations of Puma kits were really rather good. Did we just upset them at some point down the line?
It’s another one where solid colour sleeves, this time blue, just don’t work, and the different-sized stripes don’t either. I like that they’ve tried to introduce a fade to the stripes, but it makes no sense that the blue on the chest is a different blue to the blue of the sleeves. It could just be me as well, but the Carabao logo never felt right as our sponsor.
However, the biggest offending article here is the button. What is the button adding? It just serves absolutely no purpose. If anything, it really detracts from the collar line. I’m sure Mr Armani would agree with me.
22nd: 2019/20
Designer: Macron
Sponsor: Carabao
This is actually a pretty solid first effort from Macron here. Maybe I’m being a little harsh, but I simply cannot wrap my head around what is going on with this deep V-neck collar.
Good sleeves, tidy little red trim, good stripes, it has all the ingredients... but it’s really letting itself down on the collar. It’s like the adult who designed this left the room for a moment, their toddler found the blueprints and had a little play with the paper-safe scissors because that’s what adults do – use important tools – and they want to be an adult. But toddlers don’t design kits for a reason.
21st: 2011/12
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Waitrose
This design is just trying a little bit too hard to be something, but none of the little design details are really landing, in my definitely expert opinion.
The stripes are pleasantly consistent until you see the top of the shirt. The little extra white stripes, combined with the thick collar and the wide V-neck, all create a bit of a mess. The sleeves need a little bit more blue though.
However, I have to be pleased with the Puma logo and the Waitrose logo not being too overpowering and complementing the shirt design.
20th: 2025/26
Designer: Macron
Sponsor: Select Car Leasing
I’ve already said a lot of words about this in another article, so I’ll be as brief as I can here: too much white, wrong colour of blue. That’s really all that is wrong with it. It actually comes close to being something really good, but missteps and ends up in 20th.
19th: 2005/06
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Kyocera
We’re starting to move away from the eyesores now and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this shirt from nearly 20 years ago now. Can you believe that? Doesn’t feel that long ago. The 106 season shirt it might be, but putting emotion aside, it wasn’t one of the better ones in our recent(ish) history.
However, it’s just a bit… meh. The colour works fine for the collar design, the beautiful combination of Kyocera and Puma is always pleasing on the eye. The sleeves lose points for being a bit too wide and a bit too blue, but not offensively so.
I think the most off-putting part is the shape of the stripes at the top of the shirt, where it is rounded off for some unknown reason. It´s just a bit of a nothing effort really, neither good nor bad. It just exists. It does feel very much of its time though.
18th: 2009/10
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Waitrose
Just another slice of ‘OK’ really, nothing more and nothing less. Nothing wrong with that really and I do sympathise with the kit manufacturers because there isn’t a huge amount that you can do with blue and white stripes.
However, there are some things that you can avoid doing. The sleeves are pleasingly striped, so Puma get a pat on the back for this. Waitrose logo in black is fine, as it’s on the white background, but a blue Puma logo is inconsistent with this. Really though, the biggest issue is with the collar. I’m really not sure what they are trying to go for here.
The Puma logos at the very top, either side of the… what do you call it... head hole? Well, anyway, they aren’t great but they are also inoffensive enough to get away with it.
Or maybe it’s because the eye is drawn to the massive white mess around the collar. What´s going on here? It reminds me of safety bumpers you see put down when kids go ten pin bowling.
As I mentioned before, I’m not an expert, but I’m relatively confident that football shirts don’t need safety bumpers. Unless they’re being worn by Joey van den Berg. Which this one wasn’t.
17th: 2008/09
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Waitrose
Much like the one before, it’s OK but trying a little bit too hard to be something more and it doesn’t quite work for me. The stripes are quite narrow, but this works well. The collar is a bit of a mish-mash of colours but, in a rare instance of this, it actually works quite well.
It loses points for the green Waitrose printed logo, first and foremost. However, 2008/09 was the first year of Waitrose being the sponsor and this was quickly rectified for the next shirt release, so I think they realised the mistake pretty quickly.
The sleeves are too baggy and a bit too plain white, and the gold framing looks a little out of place. This wasn’t too far off being much better and I guess that’s what I feel most let down by. That didn’t stop me buying it though, so more fool me.
16th: 2013/14
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Waitrose
As with 17th, it’s really close to being a great design, but there are a couple of unforgivable errors here that detract from its potential.
Firstly, the Waitrose logo: it’s too far up the shirt. It clearly should live on the white row below.
Secondly, the little red and white vertical stripes: I‘m just not sure why they are there. Red is also an interesting choice, because we don’t really see it on the home shirts very often. I assume it’s been taken from the badge, but really, blue and white is the order of the day and if you really want to deviate then you add black.
This also seems to have caused the Puma logo to be printed in a baffling red. Once again, the Puma logo and club badge are just a little bit too high up the shirt.
What they did get right, however, was the sleeves. It’s a much better effort and they really do the heavy lifting here to salvage the shirt into a reasonably decent design.
15th: 2012/13
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Waitrose
A really solid effort actually, but the closer I inspect it the more faults I find with it. I like the thick stripes – they actually work with this design – and as such, they make the one-colour sleeves work too. But it’s just not really our style, is it?
I’m still undecided on the red Puma line on the top shoulder. I think it works? I think? But the badge in the middle of the shirt has caused this to happen, and it kind of makes the shirt look a bit imbalanced. I think, ultimately, this would be a really nice QPR shirt but it´s not a classic Reading shirt.
14th: 2001/02-2002/03
Designer: Kit@
Sponsor: Westcoast
There’s a lot to like about this one, and it’s always nice to see Kit@ and Westcoast combine on a shirt. Most of the stripes are a pleasing, classic Reading size and the Westcoast sponsor is correctly written in blue against the white. Maybe it’s a line too high though?
I’m not entirely sure the V shape works for this shirt however, and the really thick blue band at the top doesn’t look quite right, the more that I look at it. However, it’s a very solid and respectable mid-table effort here and pleasant enough.
13th: 2016/17
Designer: Puma
Sponsor: Carabao
A very pleasant shirt, no doubt about it. Great shape on the V neck, correctly choosing a blue Puma logo and nice width on the stripes. Great start there.
Now, I’m going to be a little harsh here: it would have ranked higher if the blue were the proper Reading blue, but it’s a little too light in the colour.
Another red flag is the sleeves – which, as you should know by now, need to have the stripes to work properly too. At least they aren’t too baggy.
However, the most irredeemable feature of the shirt here is the Carabao sponsor. It could just be me, but the logo draws you away from the rest of the shirt too much. There’s a lot of good work being undone by the sponsor here, sadly.
And there concludes the first half the rankings. What shirt will finish top? Are there any misses that should have been included here? Are there any that have been too harshly graded that feature here? Or did I actually manage to get any correct here?
Feel free to share comments, all the while remembering that I am more “Super-why?” than I am “Superdry”.