The Five Best Hummel Shirts Released This Season
There was a time, not all that long ago, when seeing Hummel on a new shirt felt like a pretty reliable indication that somebody had actually thought about it. The chevrons help, obviously. Few manufacturers have a piece of branding that sits so naturally on a football shirt, but there’s always been something else about Hummel at their best: an understanding that a shirt can be distinctive without having seventeen things happening at once.
That makes choosing the five best Hummel shirts released this season harder than we expected. Their 2026 output has bounced from Saint-Étienne and Brøndby to a collaboration with The Prodigy, while Sunderland somehow found a perfectly reasonable explanation for putting Elvis Presley on a Premier League shirt. Then there’s Celta Vigo, who have produced something that looks like it escaped from a particularly good page of a 1990s football annual. Here are our five.
5. AS Saint-Étienne 2026/27 Home
Sometimes green, white and a great badge is enough. Saint-Étienne’s new home shirt doesn’t immediately demand your attention in the way some of the others on this list do, but the longer you look at it, the better it gets. The white crew neck and cuffs give that famous green plenty of room, while Hummel’s chevrons sit neatly on the shoulders without taking over the shirt. Even the sponsor somehow works.
There is more going on beneath the surface. The tonal vertical detailing incorporates the ASSE crest from 1956/57, the season in which Saint-Étienne won the first of their ten French league titles. Casino’s return to the front of the shirt adds another layer of familiarity, too. It’s a good example of heritage being used rather than announced. No giant anniversary badge, no gold trim, no paragraph-long explanation required to make sense of it. Just a very handsome Saint-Étienne shirt.
4. Brøndby 2026/27 Away
There is absolutely no escaping Boca Juniors when you first see this, which is probably both the obvious criticism and part of the reason we like it so much. Brøndby’s navy away shirt is broken up by that enormous yellow band across the chest, with yellow Hummel detailing around the collar, cuffs and shoulders. It’s uncomplicated, gloriously old-fashioned and looks even better as a full team shirt than it does hanging on a rail.
The design isn’t a random excursion to Buenos Aires, either. Hummel have taken the chest band from older Brøndby shirts, while the textured fabric and restrained vertical striping stop the enormous Betano sponsor from completely swallowing the thing. The club itself describes the design as a continuation of the retro approach used on this season’s home shirt, with the yellow band specifically referencing Brøndby’s past. We’d quite happily see more manufacturers being this literal with their archives.
3. Hummel x The Prodigy
Not technically a club shirt, granted, but we’re invoking editorial privilege because look at it.
The Prodigy’s limited-edition Hummel shirt feels like the sort of band-football crossover that should exist. Designed by the band themselves, it’s almost entirely black, with tonal stripes, off-white piping and the famous ant sitting where you’d normally expect the club badge. PRODIGY crashes across the sponsor position in that instantly recognisable typeface, while the number 91 on the back references the year the band began. The latter is rendered in hand-drawn lettering by artist Tom Gordon.
Band shirts masquerading as football shirts have become increasingly common, but plenty still feel like merchandise first and football shirts second. This doesn’t. Strip away The Prodigy branding and the construction could easily belong to some particularly intimidating lower-league European side from 1993. Keep the branding and it feels unmistakably like them. That’s a difficult trick to pull off.
2. Sunderland 2026/27 Away
Sunderland. Hummel. Elvis Presley. There are collaborations that make immediate sense and then there are combinations of words that sound as though somebody has been particularly adventurous with Football Manager.
Except this one does make sense. Sunderland supporters have been singing Can’t Help Falling in Love since the late 1970s, and the club’s multi-year collaboration with the Elvis Presley Estate has turned that relationship into an away shirt. Hummel went back to the early part of Elvis’s career for the design, using the pink and black associated with his Louisiana Hayride years, with 1950s motifs and repeated SAFC detailing embossed into the fabric. The song title appears at the back of the neck.
More importantly, they’ve made a genuinely great football shirt out of a premise that could have gone horribly wrong. The polo collar is magnificent, the black shoulder panel gives the pink some weight and there’s enough weirdness about the whole thing to make it memorable. In twenty years, nobody is going to struggle to remember which season this came from. That counts for a lot.
1. Celta Vigo 2026/27 Third
This is Hummel doing what Hummel should be doing.
Celta’s third shirt takes a red base and throws a great mess of light blue and navy diamonds across it, complete with a proper collar, embroidered crest and the sort of slightly shiny fabric that immediately makes you think of football in the 1990s. Celta themselves describe it as retro-inspired, with the textured, shimmering material deliberately giving the shirt a vintage quality.
What we like most is that it doesn’t feel like Hummel have simply found an old template and pressed print. There are echoes of the decade everywhere, but it still looks like a Celta Vigo shirt made in 2026. The Estrella Galicia sponsor helps enormously, as does the fact that Hummel have resisted filling every available inch with chevrons and extra detailing.
Of the five best Hummel shirts released this season, this is the one we’d most want in the collection. It looks a little strange, a little unnecessary and about thirty years out of time. In other words, pretty much exactly what we want from a third shirt.
You can shop classic Hummel shirts in the Showboat app or on our website here.
