Should Premier League clubs return to two-year kit cycle and put planet before profit?
There was a time when buying a new football shirt meant you could reasonably expect your team to wear it for more than one season.
Arsenal’s famous bruised-banana away kit survived from 1991 to 1993, while Manchester United’s iconic blue-and-white away shirt was worn across the 1990/91 and 1991/92 campaigns. Supporters could buy a top without worrying that it would be old stock before the following summer.
Today, football operates rather differently. Every summer brings another unveiling, another collection of promotional photographs and another explanation of how the new shirt celebrates a local landmark, an architectural feature or some obscure anniversary.
The home kit is joined by away and third strips, often with special editions thrown in.
It’s a lucrative business, but also an increasingly difficult one to reconcile with football’s environmental ambitions.
Brentford have demonstrated that another approach is possible. Their new home shirt, launched in July 2026, will remain in use throughout the 2026/27 and 2027/28 seasons. Manufactured by Joma from recycled polyester, it continues the club’s policy of retaining kits for multiple seasons where commercial agreements allow.
The Bees briefly departed from that approach in 2025/26, partly because their shirt sponsorship arrangement was ending. Their latest launch restored the two-year cycle and froze prices across adult and children’s sizes. At £65 for an adult replica shirt, Brentford’s offering is also comparatively affordable – although that’s still a heck of a lot of money for a shirt.
The obvious question is what would happen if the other 19 Premier League clubs followed suit.
According to Salary Sport’s 2026/27 price survey, the average adult Premier League replica home shirt costs approximately £77. Tottenham charge £90, while Arsenal, Liverpool and both Manchester clubs charge £85.
For a supporter who would otherwise buy a new home shirt every summer, a two-year cycle could cut spending from £154 to £77 over two seasons, assuming prices remain unchanged. Someone who buys home, away and third shirts annually could save considerably more, provided clubs retained all three designs and supporters didn’t simply spend the money on other merchandise.
For families with children, annual kit releases can become an expensive ritual, particularly once names, numbers and matching shorts are included.
The commercial calculation for clubs is less straightforward. New releases generate publicity, encourage repeat purchases and provide manufacturers with regular opportunities to recover the enormous sums paid for kit sponsorship rights.
A two-year cycle could reduce sales from supporters who habitually purchase every new design. Equally, longer availability might attract customers unwilling to spend £80 on a shirt with only a few months of official use remaining.
Without detailed sales figures, nobody can confidently predict the net effect on club revenues.
The environmental argument is similarly dependent on how supporters respond. Keeping the same design for two seasons only delivers a meaningful benefit if it reduces overall production and consumption, rather than simply changing how frequently clubs unveil new shirts.
Consider a hypothetical Premier League club selling 100,000 replica home shirts every season. Over two years, that means 200,000 shirts. If retaining the same design encouraged customers to buy half as many, production could fall by 100,000 garments.
A 2026 life-cycle assessment of conventional polyester t-shirts estimated emissions of approximately 9.62kg of CO2 equivalent per garment, including production, use and disposal under its specified assumptions.
Applied purely as an illustration, that would suggest a saving of approximately 962 tonnes of CO2 equivalent from 100,000 fewer garments.
That figure should not be treated as a reliable estimate for football shirts. Replica kits differ from ordinary t-shirts in their materials, weight, manufacturing processes, transport and lifespan. Establishing an accurate saving would require manufacturers to publish product-specific emissions data.
Nevertheless, the principle is straightforward. Producing fewer garments generally means consuming fewer raw materials, manufacturing fewer products and generating less eventual textile waste.
Recycled polyester helps reduce reliance on virgin materials, but it doesn’t eliminate the environmental impact of manufacturing and selling new shirts. Making clothing last longer tackles a different part of the problem: how much clothing football encourages people to buy in the first place.
There is also a distinction between the lifespan of a shirt and its period as a club’s current kit. Supporters can, and frequently do, wear shirts for years after they have been replaced. An annual redesign doesn’t make last season’s shirt unusable. It does, however, provide another incentive to buy something new.
The obstacles to changing that cycle are primarily commercial rather than technical. Sponsorship changes, manufacturer contracts and the demand for fresh merchandise all complicate longer kit cycles. Brentford’s temporary return to an annual home shirt in 2025/26 demonstrated precisely that.
Yet football clubs increasingly promote their sustainability credentials while asking supporters to replace perfectly serviceable polyester shirts every summer.
Brentford have shown that the annual cycle isn’t compulsory. The question for the rest of the Premier League is whether selling a new shirt every year is sufficiently important to justify the environmental cost.
God forbid Premier League clubs sacrifice a few million quid in merchandise revenue each year, money that might otherwise be squandered on yet another ill-conceived transfer, for the sake of doing their supporters’ wallets and the planet a favour.
