You Could Set Your Calendar to This...

It is that time in the football kit cycle, when just before a major competition (in this case, Euro 2008), national sides introduce their new kits that they will wear for the next couple of years. There have been a whole slew of new national team shirts that have been released over the past few weeks. Many of them debuted during the last round of Euro qualifiers. Here are some of the highlights:

Adidas released new shirts for Germany and France, and I have to say both of them are quite nice. Looks like someone at Adidas was listening when we told them to ditch the boring templates. I especially like how the main design accents on the shirts reflect the respective cultures. The German design is rigid, with a lot of straight lines and seems to evoke the concept of moving forward together. Meanwhile, the French design is more artsy and the design seems to be splitting off in different directions. Sounds like France to me. Adidas also released a new shirt for Argentina, which is pretty basic and classic. Argentina almost always has a boss shirt.

Puma also released a bunch of new away shirts, for Austria, Czech, and others. Sad to see that Puma have adopted the former strategy of their German brethren Adidas with that template. It's pretty boring and lazy if you ask me. One exception is Italy's new away shirt, which I dig, except for that whacked–out font(you can't really tell from the photo, but trust me, it sucks–especially the lettering).

Nike also released some shirts, notably Brazil's new home and Holland's new away. Brazil's new shirt doesn't really do anything for me, but that new Holland away is really nice. It was always going to be tough to duplicate the success of Holland's previous away shirt, which was absolutely gorgeous. But Nike have done a pretty good job here.

All in all, it is a pretty successful period of kit releases as there was nothing absolutely horrible released, and we are heartened by Adidas' apparent ditching of the templates. Bravo.

footballkitblogupdate: looks like despite coach Hugo Sanchez's rantings about changing Mexico's home shirt from green to white, el tri will still be decked in green most of the time. They just released the new home shirt, and it is green. I wonder what that will do to Hugo's ego.