Remembering All of Liverpool’s Best Kits As They Sign Historic £60m Adidas Deal

- - Kits

Adidas LogoThe new kit deal penned by Liverpool will finally bring the club into line with the other Premier League giants.

Adidas will return for a third spell as kit manufacturer from the 2025/26 season onwards, paying £60 million a year for the privilege.

It’s an agreement that will see the Reds match similar sums paid to Manchester City (Puma), Arsenal (Adidas) and Chelsea (Nike), and is likely to be an increase on the current deal with Nike.

The American firm makes a guaranteed payment of £30 million a year to the club, with add-ons based upon the Reds’ performances on the pitch as well as royalties from replica kit and merchandise sales.

The deal with Adidas will be met with joy by many Liverpool fans – particularly those that can remember the iconic Candy kits of the early 1990s, as well as the Carlsberg-sponsored efforts from the 2000s.

Let’s hope that the German manufacturer is able to come up with something equally as classic in their 2025/26 design!

In the meantime, let’s take a walk down memory lane as we recall some of Liverpool FC’s most memorable kits from the ages.

Reds in Blue?

Original Liverpool Kit

Liverpool originally played in blue and white. Image by Ben Sutherland on Wikimedia Commons

When Liverpool FC was formed in 1892 by John Houlding, it was almost as a protest against Everton.

Houlding, a former mayor of Liverpool, had fallen out with the Toffees over their tenancy at Anfield, which was owned at the time by Houlding.

Having failed to negotiate rental terms that all parties were happy with, Everton left Anfield to take up residence at Goodison Park; which left Houlding with a void to fill.

And so he set up a new club: Liverpool FC. Perhaps in a dig at Everton, Houlding acquired a blue-and-white kit for his new team’s first season in 1892, which they continued to wear in their inaugural campaign in the Football League way back in 1893.

It wasn’t until the 1896/97 season that Liverpool finally reverted to playing in the red kit for which they have become synonymous all around the globe.

Red Men

Having differentiated themselves as the red half of Merseyside, Liverpool set about establishing themselves as a giant of English football – which they did with Division One titles in 1901 and 1906; as well as the 17 others that would follow.

The club became synonymous with wearing red, and so throughout the first half of the twentieth century their kit reflected the fact – the shirt would be solid red, the shorts white (until a switch to red in 1964) and the socks either plain red or red-and-white hoops.

As football kits up and down the land evolved, so too did the design of Liverpool’s famous strip. For the 1955/56 campaign, the shirt featured Liverpool’s badge for the first time – the red Liverbird on a white background has remained in situ, albeit in a slightly different form, some seven decades later.

For the 1965/66 season, Liverpool switched to an all-red kit. There was, so the old story goes, some psychology at play in the decision: Bill Shankly wanted to play all in red to elicit feelings of power and danger. After seeing man mountain Ron Yeats try on a prototype of the kit, Shankly was convinced – his men would go on to win the First Division title in that first season in head-to-toe red.

A New Dawn

The 1970s were notable for three new innovations for Liverpool’s playing kit.

The first was the introduction of an independent kit manufacturer. Previously, Liverpool’s strips were made in-house, but in 1973 that all-changed when Umbro were tasked with the design and manufacture of the club’s new kit.

The second set of changes related to the Liverbird crest. Stitched in yellow for the first time, the badge worn proudly on the chest by players and fans alike would remain so until a subsequent redesign in 1985.

And finally, Liverpool jumped on board with football’s increasing commercialism in 1979, with Hitachi penning a deal to become the club’s first-ever front-of-shirt sponsor.

During the 1980s, a faint white vertical stripe was added to the shirt, with Crown Paints replacing Hitachi as sponsor. This was the strip in which the Reds won two First Division titles and the European Cup.

The white vertical line lasted just three seasons, with Adidas replacing Umbro as manufacturer in 1985. After a couple of years of Crown Paints kits, the switch was made to the iconic Candy branding in 1988. That great kit was matched by a sublime Liverpool vintage too, who won the First Division title and two editions of the FA Cup during this period.

If Carlsberg Did Football Kits….

For the best part of two decades, Danish beer company Carlsberg became inextricably linked to Liverpool FC thanks to their logo on the front of the various iterations of kit.

Those were lean times on the pitch for Liverpool, but at least they looked good – both Adidas and Reebok producing stellar kits throughout the 1990s.

Reebok took the helm from 1996 to 2006 – signing off in style with the ‘Miracle of Istanbul’ Champions League win of 2005, before Adidas returned to design duties.

A string of forgettable seasons on the pitch were matched thereafter by a series of nondescript kits from the likes of Warrior and New Balance, although the 2010/11 season was the first to feature Standard Chartered as front-of-shirt sponsor; a partnership that still exists to this day more than a decade later.

We look forward to seeing what Adidas have up their sleeves, if you’ll pardon the pun!

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