Liverpool should be the easiest club in the world to secure a hit shirt for a new season of Premier League and Champions League football. Make it red, stick a Liver Bird on the chest and do not mess around with the look too much and fans of the Anfield giants will snap it up in droves.
When Bill Shankly decked the team out in red shirts, red shorts and red socks in a European tie in 1964 he quipped: “You look awesome, terrifying. You look 7ft tall.” Since then it has been relatively easy to get the Liverpool shirt right.
Make it red. Make it simple. Add a subtle pinstripe or a funky collar if necessary but don’t overthink it.
At the same time it must make designing the new Liverpool 2024/25 shirt quite difficult. There are not too many little design flairs you can pull but the challenge remains that you have to make the kit sufficiently different from previous years to encourage people to part with their hard-earned cash.
So we have the Nike Liverpool 2024/25 shirt. Priced at £80 for adults and £65 for children and available to pre-order here in time for sales in less than a week.
Sadly, the new Liverpool shirt is expensive, clumsy and muddled. In a time when the club is seeking clarity in a post-Klopp world the last of the five-year Nike tie-in is just a bit mediocre. Here is our review of the new Liverpool shirt.
Liverpool 2024/25 kit design review
Let’s start with the plus points. It’s red. I always prefer Liverpool playing in a slightly darker red. Perhaps it harks back to rain-soaked European nights when Liverpool’s passing and movement machine lit up glum Merseyside nights. The shirts always looked darker and heavier in those days. A moodier, blood red seems to be more menacing and dramatic than the bright and breezy 1990s designs worn by the more lightweight Liverpool sides.
That’s a personal preference and many will disagree. Here the red is just fine and hardly worth a complaint.
The collar however, does warrant a complaint. Half-finished and clumsily tacked on it looks awkward and try-hard. Nike is clearly very proud of doing something different with kit collars this year and this monstrosity proudly adorns the brand’s international kits set to appear at Euro 2024 too but it draws all of the attention from other design touches and looks unfinished.
I’m all for Nike trying new things but I dislike brands that use the world’s biggest football clubs to push their own ideas of brand marketing. Liverpool is the jewel in Nike’s crown and shouldn’t just be a billboard to showcase some quirky design ideas to the world.
Elsewhere there is nothing much wrong with the kit. The pinstripe design has appeared on the likes of the 1984 shirt and the more recent 2013/14 kit (ironically that year seems to boast the other half of the missing collar here).
This is a bolder version, with the ‘stripes’ spelling out YNWA if you squint a bit. It’s different and you can’t blame Nike for trying but with the lighter red and weird collar it all just looks a bit busy. It’s even more pronounced on junior and infant kit sizes, while keyrings showcasing the shirt are all starting to look a bit Southampton.
Liverpool 2024/25 kit prices
The new England kit should be a barometer of how much a club is ripping off fans with their shirt launches. The England kit, which will be worn for a single tournament of football and a handful of friendlies and qualifiers, costs £85 for an adult shirt and £125 if you want an ‘authentic’ version as worn by the players.
Of course, it feels silly to complain when ever major club and international team on the planet is charging similar excessive fees for shirts. This isn’t a new thing and it’s not solely a Nike thing either.
The new Liverpool kit is a bit cheaper than the England one. An adult shirt is £80 while the authentic version is similarly priced to England at £125.
You can get a shirt for your child for £60 but shorts are another £32 and socks are £18. You are looking at exactly £100 to get a full kit in a child size for the new season. If you have two young Reds you’re shelling out £200 before you even get to the jackets, training tops and other bits and pieces that the club hopes fans will snap up.
For £200 you are not even getting the ‘authentic’ versions of these shirts. It’s just ridiculously expensive to wear your team’s shirt and Liverpool and Nike are not the only culprits here. Sadly, there are very few alternatives.
Should you buy the Liverpool 2024/25 kit?
Fans will still buy this shirt despite the muddled design and high prices. It’s not a terrible kit but it is a forgetable one and given Nike, Standard Chartered and the badge itself have been around for a few years now savvy buyers could probably get away with buying last year’s at a much more affordable price.
Next year will likely be one of the better Liverpool shirts as the club moves to Adidas, whose designs have been significantly better than Nike in the last few months. If they can move back towards simple, elegant designs with the iconic three stripes then there could also be an argument for saving your money for next year.
You can buy the Liverpool kit for 2024/25 here.
