There's a lot of goalkeeper kits

Are there too many goalkeeper kits in football? The question arises from a curious statistic according to which Manchester United has already used six different goalkeeper kits since the beginning of the season. Not only that, Onana has used four different kits in the first five days of the championship. In detail, from the end of August until now, Onana has worn three versions of the kit with the Three Stripes, the classic adidas logo, and three versions of the kit with the Trefoil and the old Manchester United logo, the latter being special productions made by adidas for the Tier A+ Elite clubs of its sponsorship pyramid as part of the celebrations for the company's 75th anniversary. A fragmentation that reflects that of modern football, with more and more jerseys and therefore the need for goalkeepers to differentiate themselves from the outfield players of both teams. The quirkiness, therefore, is both a victim of increasingly stringent regulations towards the goalkeeper jerseys customizations and due to the continuous changes imposed by technical sponsors, who also rightly want to keep the attention on the clubs' kits. Such a large number, however, does not solve the main problem of goalkeeper jerseys in recent years: they are all the same.

Watching a football match, one gets the impression that there are standard goalkeeper kit models that clothing companies then adjust according to their own needs, those of the clubs, and those of the regulations. There is no deviation from the idea of a solid-colored kit, with colors that have little to do with both the club's tradition and innovation. Staying on the kits worn by Onana, who had access to the entire wardrobe imagined by the Three Stripes for goalkeepers, it is immediately noticeable how they are all identical in colors and shapes: a geometric pattern that develops on the entire front of the jersey in an alternation of colored shapes with horizontal lines and dots positioned above diamonds and triangles in a solid color but in a lighter shade than the main color of the jersey. The same goes for the Trefoil, solid-colored kits broken up by the second color used for details. This means that Neuer, Courtois, and Onana, apart from some exceptions related to the Trefoil models, have worn the same goalkeeper kits despite playing for three different teams.

This same concept can also be extended to other brands. For example, Nike has provided six different goalkeeper kits for Liverpool, all in solid colors but with two different shades of the same color that develop along the jersey with a psychedelic pattern. The problem is that some of these models have been reproduced in an identical manner for Inter and Chelsea, two other Swoosh-branded clubs. Apart from some small details, we are facing a standard production for almost all brands, an assembly line in which the production of a goalkeeper kit becomes more of an obstacle than an opportunity, solved by providing teams with more and more goalkeeper kits without finding a real creative solution. The only daring attempts are focused on the patterns to be used on the front but once the appropriate solution is found, the product is replicated for all clubs without substantial differences.

One of the few who has tried to distinguish their production is PUMA: for the 2024/25 season, the German brand has created a model for goalkeeper jerseys on which a pattern inspired by the human genome is applied. The pattern has been used by most of the clubs associated with PUMA but for example, Milan does not share any goalkeeper kits with Borussia Dortmund and Manchester City, the three top clubs in the sponsorship pyramid. Of course, PUMA is not immune to the policy of replicated kits, although some details have been adopted to differentiate them. For example, Borussia Dortmund and Manchester City, in addition to sharing two identical kits, one pink and one beige, also have a third camouflage kit that is similar but not identical: brown with pink details for City and olive green with fluorescent yellow details for Borussia. Aesthetic subtleties that have the effect of adding value to a product like that of goalkeeper kits, which otherwise risks falling into the anonymity of repetitiveness.