Adidas’ reign started out rocky at best this past season, but in their sophomore offering they took the opportunity to right the ship and crashed it directly into the pitch. After a series of leaks hinted at this abomination being christened the newest incarnation of Juventus F.C.’s beloved bianconero, it’s officially been unveiled today. I held out in hopes that it was a mistake, that it couldn’t be real, but I still wrote this piece well in advance, so I guess I knew it to be true all along (and living in America, people are going to keep asking me the same dumb questions either way).

Now before a barrage of comments beats it into the ground: yes, opinions on aesthetics are subjective. So then, by that admission, you’ll indulge mine.

This awkward pinstripe / clunky rectangle hybrid we find ourselves with here fails on the very first basic parameter: just make the stripes the same size! It looks like the middle two black ones crashed together in the center like a trash compactor, leaving us, somehow, with four different stripe widths on the same torso at one time if you count the sides.

 

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Shades of Newcastle in our new kit?

It looks less like an official kit and more like a bad counterfeit for which the bootlegger didn’t even try. It looks like someone rearranged Newcastle’s worst effort. It looks like someone tried to make tuxedo suspenders. It looks like a giant white H. For “Horrible.” It is bad, it is not good, and the ghosts of Notts Country would be disappointed to discover their legacy led to this. For this, the creator’s acronym now surely stands for “All Day I Design Awful Shirts.”

 

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Full-bodied, no-nonsense 90’s kits

It’s clear that the glory days of well blended, simple, and full-bodied kits of the ‘90s and prior are done and dusted, but we’ve seen glimpses of class in recent years, namely Nike’s farewell in 2014-15, which saw a return of a collar atop a well-rounded and clean shirt. History shows any attempt to break the harmony of the stripes surrounding the jersey fail, like 2002-03’s weird rounded box effect, 2003-04’s stripes that seemed to give up entirely halfway down for some reason, and Adidas’ recent debut for us, which crammed a record number of stripes into one shirt but of different sizes and directions resulting in little more than cluttered confusion.

It feels uncomfortable to see such a beautiful club adorned with such disastrous uniforms. Sure, it’s not the ridiculous concepts of Napoli’s fake denim and not one but two camouflage laughs, but that’s the problem – our famous black and white history is an established and gorgeous one that deserves better. Even the grayscale preview placeholder design was easier on the eyes. Even typically “bad” examples like Kappa’s 1996-97 third kit are at least interesting and amazing even if only in a novelty sense. The only thing worse than this was that dark period in which we actually wore this solid neon green atrocity, but we don’t speak of that anymore.

People love to say that we always come to appreciate the shirts for what they represent on the pitch rather than their visual appearance, and in a way that’s true; if you win the Champions League in a burlap sack with lines drawn on it in crayon it’ll probably still hold more positive, lasting emotions than a pretty attractive jersey in which you bombed (looking at you, 2009-10). But though the current state of affairs means we may be on course for a sixth straight scudetto while wearing this (and it’s that good fortune that allows me to gripe about relative trivialities such as this), I can’t imagine Juventini ever looking back on it with anything more than a cringe, a laugh, and of course, a loving “Fino alla fine, forza Juventus!” all the same.

Kit image from Juventus.com