It’s every soccer fan's dream to play a part on the pitch, and thanks to a new collaboration between Puma and Manchester City, they finally can. A new competition lets fans of the Premier League champions use Puma’s AI Creator tool to design their very own soccer jersey, with one lucky winner’s creation set to be turned into the team’s 2026/27 third kit.
I was lucky enough to get some hands-on time with the software at Man City’s Etihad Stadium, and try my hand at becoming a sports fashion designer ahead of its launch today – and my experience has given me an insight into how AI can bring communities together to fuel creativity.
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So what’s the competition?
The Puma AI Creator is a first-of-its-kind kit-design platform that the sportswear brand has developed specially for the competition. The winning design will be worn by the team’s global stars like Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne, Jack Grealish, and will even be sold to fans, a first for a professional soccer club, allowing fan input into one of the most important elements of any club’s season.
Man City goalkeepers Ederson and Stefan Ortega, and team-mate Rico Lewis got to try out the AI tool to create a one-of-a-kind goalkeeper kit that will be worn on the pitch later this season in the Premier League. The design they came up with takes inspiration from the pitch, with added elements from the goal’s netting. This kit, unlike the winning design from the competition, is not likely to be available for purchase.
Speaking at the launch of the contest, Nuria Tarre, Chief Marketing & Fan Experience Officer for City Football Group, explained that the collaboration was part of Man City’s efforts to engage with their millions of fans around the globe.
She said “Giving the best fan experience possible is at the heart of a lot of the things we do, and as you probably know, Manchester City embraces innovation and technology. We’re not afraid of trialing new ways to engage with fans because a lot of our fans are not in Manchester or even in the UK. 99% of our audiences are global, so finding new ways to engage those fans around the world is important."
“I think having the opportunity to work with a partner like PUMA, which is very forward-thinking and embraces new technologies, was a unique combination for us to come up with this idea and collaborate together. It gives the power back to the fans.”
The platform is available online, and fans will have access to 15 free tokens, with each token enabling them to create four designs – they’ll then be able to submit their two best creations for the competition. If entrants want to get more chances to come up with the perfect jersey, they can vote on other people’s designs to gain more tokens.
I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to produce credible designs with the Puma AI Creator, and I even managed to create a third kit that wouldn’t look out of place worn by some of the world’s top players. You simply enter a prompt and choose a style, in a similar way to using the best AI image generators like Midjourney. Once you’ve chosen the style and selected your base colors, Puma’s AI tool, which is powered by DeepObjects.AI, gets to work and creates four designs from your prompt. I asked for ‘The Loch Ness Monster next to a Viking ship’, in an attempt to merge my Scottish roots with those of Manchester City’s Norwegian superstar Haaland, and the AI tool did a decent job of bringing my idea to life, albeit without any sign of Nessie.
Once you choose your favorite from the four options, you can then choose different trims and colors for the shirt, even opting for different collar styles to help bring your design to life. Once you’re done, you can submit your entry, and hope that your creation ends up being chosen. Manchester City and Puma will shortlist 10 designs, with the winner selected by fans in an online vote next year.
Tarre added: “I think the layer of global competition is a way to enhance this creativity even further and to dial up fans' presence. Fans are always at the core, you know, clubs belong to fans. There’s a lot of emotional connection with a jersey, kit, call it whatever you want wherever you are in the world.”
And that’s exactly what Man City and Puma hope to do with this competition: enable fans from around the globe to connect with their club in a tangible way, and give them the opportunity to create something unique.
As a massive sports fan myself, the idea of playing a part in my team makes me jump with joy, and this is a prime example of AI allowing those of us without artistic ability to have the chance to bring our own concepts to life. Before the AI renaissance, these kinds of competitions would be limited to the artists among us; but that’s no longer the case.
Ivan Dashkov, Head of Emerging Tech for Puma, had some advice for how to get the best out of AI Creator: “Try a bunch of different things and play with it. Just like anything else, it’s a tool and it takes skill. It takes a little bit of time to figure out what prompts work well and what ones don’t work as much.”
One of Dashkov’s own ideas sounds as crazy as they come, but it’s an excellent showcase of the endless possibilities you can create for the competition. He told me: “One of my prompts I did that turned out very nice was ‘repeating pattern of the moons of Jupiter from the perspective of being on Europa in the art style of artist Diego Rivera’. It was absolutely wild, and I thought the AI came up with something really cool.”
The Manchester City PUMA AI Creator contest is available now via the Puma AI Creator website, and fans can submit designs until 20 December before the best are whittled down to a top 10. Have a think about your ideal soccer jersey and maybe, if you're lucky, your design could be part of the 2026/26 Premier League season.
