The 2026 NWSL season is upon us, and so are its kits.
All 16 of the league’s clubs got new kits ahead of this season, and for the first time the league gave select clubs the opportunity to design third kits. The resulting collection, which includes initial home and away looks for debutants Boston Legacy and Denver Summit, is a mixed bag.
The NWSL encouraged teams to explore their connections to their home cities, the league says, and some clubs did better than others. Here, then, are five of the NWSL’s most interesting new kits.
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A look made in Looavul
In the late 1800s, long before most of America was electrified, affluent homeowners in pockets of the US hung elaborate, mirrored fixtures from their ceilings to amplify the effect of the dozens of candles they often used to light their homes. A few decades later, Louis Bernard Woeste of Newport, Kentucky, patented his own creation, the “myriad reflector”. His pitch to consumers, printed in the pages of a local newspaper in 1922, feels like a fever dream.
“[It] will change a hall into a brilliant fairyland of flashing, changing, living colors,” Woeste wrote, “a place of a million colored sparks, darting and dancing, chasing one another into every nook and corner – filling the hall with dancing fireflies of a thousand hues.”
It took another half-century, but Woeste’s creation would hang from the ceiling of nearly every American disco and nightclub – earning the name we currently know it by, the disco ball. Another half-century later, it has made it to the NWSL, in the form of Racing Louisville’s Disco Kit. At the peak of production, the club says, 90% of the world’s disco balls were made in the city.
The city’s unique drawl is represented, too, in a small badge on the jersey which reads “made in Looavul”. The pronunciation is a warm blanket to those of us raised in the southern reaches of the Ohio valley, in the way our supermarket is Krogers, not Kroger.
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A plant print with a side of prose
It must be exhausting to be a kit designer in American soccer. Every year, you have to find some new, hyper-local detail to pin your entire design around, and every year you have to write some verbose prose that pins that detail to your creation.
It’s taken the North Carolina Courage less than a decade to achieve record levels of kit specificity with their Become Kit. This shirt pays homage to the Venus flytrap, North Carolina’s – and I quote – “official carnivorous plant”. The plant is native only to the nitrogen and phosphorus-lacking wetland bogs of a tiny, 62-mile stretch of North and South Carolina. Its status as an endangered species has made the plant a popular target for poachers. (In the way the Courage’s defense was last season? I’m so sorry.)
Of all of the “all-over” prints that are all the rage among this year’s crop of NWSL and MLS kits, North Carolina’s is pulled off effectively. The details are nice, too, though I don’t know what to call that collar. Shawl collar? Fold collar? Peter Pan collar? Whatever the case, North Carolina’s explainer text continues to take the cake for this year’s most unhinged babble:
The “Become” Kit is the North Carolina Courage’s first third kit and completes the trifecta of the three defining words from our Place to Be manifesto: Believe (Triangle Kit), Belong (Very Berry Kit), and Become.
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Not quite peak bloom
I say this as a Washingtonian: DC-area sports teams, I am begging you, make a decent cherry-blossomed-themed kit.
Few things in the District are as iconic as its cherry blossoms, which turn the tidal basin into a pink wonderland every spring. Over the years, DC’s major sports teams have taken their own swings at cherry blossom-themed uniforms. MLB’s Washington Nationals gave us a strong entrant with their 2022 City Connect uniforms, and the Wizards and Capitals have both made their own semi-successful attempts.
After years of clamoring from fans, DC United, the city’s MLS side, took a swing at executing the cherry blossom kit in 2023. That effort, too, fell short.
Now, we get the Washington Spirit’s Spirit in Bloom kit. The Spirit have in recent years done almost everything better than United – on and off the field – but they fumbled this assignment. The club says they were trying to portray cherry blossoms “drifting gracefully along the [Potomac] river” but this confusing, difficult-to-read print looks more like television static than anything else.
Meanwhile, DC-area fans will continue to wait for a decent Cherry Blossom kit. You’re on the clock, Washington Mystics and Commanders. Or maybe the responsibility will fall to the Gainbridge Super League’s DC Power. Or are we going to leave this up to the DC Defenders of the vaunted United Football League? Will Major League Rugby’s Old Glory DC step up to the plate? Is there an ultimate Frisbee team out there that can finally just handle this assignment?
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A Statue of Liberty fever dream
The league’s defending champions have stormed into 2026 with what’s arguably one of the wildest designs in NWSL history. Whether this Max Headroom-fueled fever dream is a good or bad kit is entirely up to the eye of the beholder.
To my eye, though, the club’s Lady Liberty Kit is awful. Ever wonder what it would be like to view the Statue of Liberty through the lines of a scrambled cable box? Is that a torch?! I think I see a torch! I’m also bothered when teams stray away from their club’s colors – this looks like an FC Cincinnati kit, not a Gotham kit, though I suppose in fairness this is a third kit. I also know that these are the colors of New York state.
Your colors are black, white and sky blue, Gotham! Incidentally, two of those are the official colors of Harrison, New Jersey. In any case, most Gotham fans will probably be comforted by the jersey’s smallest detail: the new gold star over the crest.
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A classic soccer jersey? What a concept
The Chicago Stars FC rolled out their Chicago DNA Kit, one of the few in the NWSL’s 2026 collection that looks like – imagine this – a soccer jersey!
Chicago’s design is elegant and wearable and bucks the leaguewide trend of all-over prints in favor of something more traditional. The club has had some decent looks over the years. The 2020 Neighborhood Kit comes to mind. But this may be the best kit in the club’s history.
