Is the new trend the inserts on game shorts?

Every football season has its own aesthetic peculiarity and we already have a candidate for the victory of this award for the 2024/25 season: the colored inserts in the game shorts. Or at least this is the first big stylistic sign that has arrived since the beginning of the new football season. All the major brands have decided to follow this trend, albeit in different ways. The preview came during Euro2024 with adidas reintroducing one of its most iconic templates, the Teamgeist, and consequently all the other brands followed the direction set by the Three Stripes. All the national teams branded by the German company, including the European Champion Spain, wore jerseys with a colored stripe on the bottom that connected to a stripe on the shorts. An optical effect to offer a sense of continuity between the pattern of the shirt and that of the shorts. Obviously, adidas also proposed this pattern for its most important club teams.

In Italy, for example, the Home kit of Juventus includes black shorts with a white stripe, designed as a continuation of one of the vertical white stripes on the shirt. The same pattern is also used for the second yellow kit, with a pink stripe that starts from the jersey and ends on the shorts. The examples don't end here. The new Premier League season was opened by Manchester United-Fulham, two teams branded by adidas and therefore both testimonial for the inserts on the shorts, just like Arsenal. Even for the Home jersey of Real Madrid, adidas decided to create shorts with inserts, but the difference from all the previous cases is that the kit was not "dirty". The total white look of Real Madrid was saved with a trick, namely a tone-on-tone in which the inserted stripe on the shorts is slightly lighter than the original tone of the kit.

However, as mentioned, adidas is not the only clothing company that has opted for inserts in the game shorts. PUMA has adopted this solution for the Home jersey of Manchester City and in this case we are talking about a navy blue curved stripe inserted in the back of the shorts. The same pattern was also seen on the shorts of Borussia Dortmund, Leipzig and Marseille. The exception is represented by Milan, as PUMA has created clean, solid-colored shorts for both the Home and Away kits. Even Nike has not held back and, for example, the Inter Away kit is characterized by a vertical band on the side that seamlessly flows into the shorts, the same pattern used for the Away kit of Chelsea. As mentioned, many examples from different brands to confirm that we are facing a trend but above all that nothing is left to chance: even the shorts can become something more than a solid-colored garment with the player's number on it.