The five most noteworthy NWSL kits of 2026: disco balls, a Lady Liberty fever dream and more | NWSL

The 2026 NWSL season is upon us, and so are its kits.

All 16 clubs in the league received new kits ahead of this season and, for the first time, the league gave some clubs the option to design third kits. The resulting collection, which includes debut home and away looks from debutants Boston Legacy and Denver Summit, is a mixed bag.

The NWSL has encouraged teams to explore their hometown ties, according to the league, and some clubs have done better than others. So here are five of the most interesting new kits in the NWSL.

A look made in Looavul

In the late 1800s, long before most of America was electrified, wealthy homeowners in parts of the United States hung elaborate mirrored light 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 speech to consumers, printed in the pages of a local newspaper in 1922, reads like a fever dream.

“[It] will transform a room into a brilliant fairyland of bright, changing, flashing colors,” Woeste wrote, “a place of a million colored sparks, darting and dancing, chasing each other into every nook and cranny – filling the room with dancing fireflies of a thousand hues.” »

It took another half century, but Woeste’s creation would hang from the ceiling of almost every American discotheque and nightclub, earning it the name we know it by now, the disco ball. Half a century later, it reached the NWSL, in the form of Racing Louisville’s disco kit. According to the club, at the peak of production, 90% of the world’s disco balls were made in the city.

The town’s unique drawl is also represented by a small badge on the jersey that reads “made in Looavul”. The pronunciation is a warm blanket for those of us who grew up in the southern Ohio Valley, like our supermarket. Krogers, not Kroger.

A plant print with a prose side

It must be exhausting being an equipment designer in American football. Every year you have to find some new hyper-local detail on which to pin your entire design, and every year you have to write wordy prose that pins that detail to your creation.

It took less than a decade for the North Carolina Courage to reach record levels of kit specificity with their Become Kit. This shirt pays homage to the Venus flytrap, the “official carnivorous plant” of North Carolina – and I quote –. The plant is native only to the moist, nitrogen- and phosphorus-deprived bogs of a small 62-mile stretch of North and South Carolina. Its status as an endangered species has made this plant a favored target for poachers. (Like the Courage defense was last season? I’m so sorry.)

Of all the all-over prints that are all the rage among this year’s crop of NWSL and MLS kits, North Carolina’s is a hit. The details are nice too, although I don’t know what to call this collar. A shawl collar? Folded collar? A Claudine collar? Regardless, North Carolina’s explanatory text continues to take the prize for this year’s most unbalanced chatter:

The “Become” kit is the first third kit from the North Carolina Courage and completes the trio of three defining words from our Place to Be manifesto: Believe (Triangle Kit), Belong (Very Berry Kit) and Become.

No peak flowering yet

I say this as a Washingtonian: D.C. area sports teams, please, make a decent cherry blossom-themed kit.

Few things in the district are as iconic as its cherry blossoms, which transform the tidal basin into a pink wonderland each spring. Over the years, DC’s major sports teams have adopted cherry blossom-themed uniforms. MLB’s Washington Nationals gave us a solid entrant with their 2022 City Connect uniforms, and the Wizards and Capitals both made semi-successful attempts of their own.

After years of complaints from fans, DC United, the city’s MLS team, attempted to run the cherry blossom kit in 2023. That effort also failed.

Now we are getting the Spirit in Bloom kit from Washington Spirit. In recent years, the Spirit have done almost everything better than United – on and off the pitch – but they have failed in this mission. The club says they were trying to depict cherry blossoms “gracefully drifting along the [Potomac] river”, but this confusing and difficult to read print looks more like static television images than anything else.

Meanwhile, fans in the DC area will continue to wait for a decent Cherry Blossom kit. You’re on time, Washington Mystics and Commanders. Or perhaps the blame will fall to DC Power of the Gainbridge Super League. Or will we leave that to the DC Defenders of the vaunted United Football League? Will Major League Rugby’s Old Glory DC take over? Is there an Ultimate Frisbee team that can finally accomplish this mission?

A fever dream of the Statue of Liberty

The league’s reigning champions have burst into 2026 with what is arguably one of the craziest schemes in NWSL history. Whether this Max Headroom-fueled fever dream is a good or bad piece of kit is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

In my eyes, however, the club’s Lady Liberty kit is awful. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the Statue of Liberty through the lines of a scrambled cable box? Is it a torch?! I think I see a torch! It also bothers me when teams stray from their club colors – it looks like an FC Cincinnati kit, not a Gotham kit, although I guess in fairness it’s a third kit. I also know these are the state colors of New York.

Your colors are black, white and sky blue, Gotham! By the way, two of them are the official colors of Harrison, New Jersey. Either way, most Gotham fans will likely be comforted by the jersey’s smallest detail: the new gold star on the crest.

A classic football jersey? What an idea

Chicago Stars FC have 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 stylish and wearable and bucks the all-over print trend in favor of something more traditional. The club has had a good look over the years. I’m thinking of the 2020 Neighborhood Kit. But it’s perhaps the best kit in the club’s history.