The Nigeria national football team, known as the Super Eagles, has a rich history dating back to its first official game in October 1949 when Nigeria was still a British colony. Over the years, their jerseys have evolved, becoming not just symbols of national pride but also fashion statements. Let's delve into the history of these iconic kits.
Early Years and Adidas Era
In their initial matches in the UK, the Nigerian team sported a dark green shirt. The early 1990s saw the release of Nigeria's first notable jerseys, crafted by Adidas with designs typical of that era.
The Nike Revolution (1995-1996)
Nigeria's kits gained significant global attention when Nike took over from Adidas in 1995/1996. However, the initial years with Nike featured some of the most uninspiring designs in the team's history. When a World Cup kit is good, it becomes iconic. Due to the competition’s quadrennial nature, each time the world’s biggest sporting event comes to town is one of a very limited number of opportunities to show the fuck out.
Adidas returned as Nigeria's kit maker after the 2002 World Cup.
The 2018 World Cup Jersey: A Fashion Phenomenon
The 2018 World Cup kit designed by Nike became an instant sensation. When Nike revealed its full lineup of World Cup kits for this summer's games, Nigeria's was the obvious star. Sure, eyes may have paused at Australia’s wild yellow kits, or the classic cut of England’s all whites, but it was one flashy white-and-green jersey that stole the show. Nigeria’s triangle patterned home kit became not just the best one revealed for this tournament; it instantly became the hottest piece of soccer gear since Juventus’s Drake-modeled pink jersey from the 2015-2016 season. Alongside the Super Eagles’s hit jersey, Nike also released a collection of other gear, including track jackets, bucket hats, and boards shorts, all boasting the same shades of green and that distinct pattern.
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The kit, featuring an unripe-lime green body with white-and-black sleeves and jagged vertical stripes resembling the wings of the team’s mascot, the Super Eagles, was a hit. It looked less like a traditional soccer kit and more like a hyped-up sneaker, reminiscent of the Nike design seen on Acronym’s Vapormax.
Designing Nigeria's World Cup 2018 jersey kit Speed Art
The jersey was almost unanimously considered the coolest of the year, transforming from athletic gear into coveted streetwear.
The Hype and Demand
Since its unveiling in February, the jersey allegedly garnered three million pre-orders and sold out rapidly. The Nigeria jersey provides a case study in how the streetwear internet works in 2018: cool-looking object gets hyped up endlessly until its coolness is a fact carved into stone. Every day ultra-limited sneakers and items from hyped up streetwear brands trade back and forth on secondary platforms like Grailed or StockX, but it’s unusual for a soccer jersey to find its way onto the secondary market.
The design's appeal, especially compared to plainer jerseys like England’s, fueled the hype. The shirt was sent through the hype machine. Then Nike came out and announced that three million people had already bought the jerseys before they were even released. As Quartz notes, analysts were skeptical of those figures since there wasn’t any apparent way to even buy the kits when that was announced. Still, this didn’t stop the internet from going after these jerseys with serious hypebeast passion.
Soccer as Fashion Inspiration
Soccer has increasingly influenced the fashion world. We’ve seen this happen countless times, sure-just not usually with a soccer jersey. But it does feel about time for soccer to have a moment like this. Remember that just a couple years ago Drake Instagrammed himself in a pink jersey from the Italian club Juventus, bumping sales for that particular kit. And soccer has been the inspiration for other designers in the fashion world: Gosha Rubchinskiy collaborated with Adidas on several kits and labels like Versace and Burberry have taken inspiration from the sport in recent collections. When Abloh released his collection of soccer gear with Nike he noted how the sport had a defined visual identity. “The great thing about the vocabulary and history of football is that aesthetically it has its own look,” he said.
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The Nigeria jerseys seem to tap into what designers already knew: soccer is fashion, or at least a sport worthy of being mined for fashion inspiration and turned into luxury soccer scarfs or streetwear-adjacent jerseys. And so why shouldn’t a team have jerseys befitting that status? When the Super Eagles line up against Croatia in Russia next week, they’ll certainly be the best-dressed dudes on the field.
The Design Process
To get a better sense of how an instantly-iconic World Cup kit comes to life, we hit up Nike FC’s Design Director Pete Hoppins, who is in charge of not just the jerseys worn in Russia this summer but also the apparel that brings the “story” of a country to life through soccer. We work to a timeline, a plan...if you have to make 100,000 jerseys or a million jerseys, those jerseys have to be manufactured and shipped. We have a calendar that is over two years out from the event. For example, we’re designing Euro Championship jerseys for 2020 right now. We’re almost finished. The kick-off for the process starts even earlier than that sometimes, as much as three years out. We use the big moments in time, Euros or World Cup, to rally behind a new innovation. A new aesthetic for Nike Football.
We start off working with our innovation partners within designs to create a chassis for the kit, a new innovation. That is often a fabric or yarn that’s going to increase performance; lighter weight, or faster drying than before. That’s the goal: improve on the chassis of the uniform with design. To align with that innovation, we create a new aesthetic and look for Nike Football. That can be something that helps tell the story of that innovation, or a mood and feeling that we want to portray to the world. We want to also help the players feel faster and more skillful than they have ever felt before.
We get briefed by the various countries or clubs around what they want in their kit...or what they don’t want to see. If you take Brazil, for example, it’s going to be yellow. There’s no skirting around that one, this is what it’s going to be. That’s more about us bringing out the soul of Brazil into something that is always a yellow jersey. Some countries will have very specific briefs of what they want, others won’t. We’ll always do our own research ourselves, within those countries, to capture the mood and feeling of that country and what they want to stand up for. Each country is completely different, what suits their style. Brazil, it’s always clean and purist, always vibrant but it also has this kind of toughness to it. Then you look at someone like France, and it’s always about sophistication and style. WIthin that, there are still some shared Nike filter that brings the entire collection together.
With the Nigeria kit and collection, what we wanted to do is take a team who there is less expectations on from the media and fans in terms of both on the field performance and kit design. There is less pressure to not mess with the kit than, say, England. While no one expects Nigeria to challenge for the World Cup, we felt that there’s something going on with Nigeria as a young team. There’s a confidence in all these young players, they’re going to go for it and we were attracted to that. We’ve been following them from afar, and the players on social media...a lot of them are playing in some of the top clubs in Europe, and there’s that boldness that aligns in Nigeria and Lagos and in London.
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Often, the kit might have an amazing story but sometimes you only have one platform to tell it. If you look at this one from a collection point of view, it’s like, “Why wouldn’t you do that?” Not everyone wants to wear the uniform, but there’s something for everybody there. Every other company would love to have the assets that Nike does, and we’re trying to stretch them into the world of fashion and culture, not just performance.
Nigeria was actually the easiest! That’s everyone having fun. We worked closer with the players and the Nigerian federation to make that happen. The hardest were Brazil and England, just like always. It’s got to be a yellow kit and a white kit, respectively. You have to deliver that. Otherwise, you’ll be shot. [laughs] How do you move those forward every two, four years? Especially when you’re trying to innovate the performance. We’re not just going to add things to the kits for the sake of it.
A guy here named Matt Wolff, he designed this home kit. He was inspired by the classic 1994 kit with the eagle wings. We kept pushing the design and pushing it and pushing it to see how far we could go until we were like...that just looks fire. We had this super energetic kit on a team where we think we can get it through the board. Ultimately, our client is the board, the president of Nigerian soccer has to sign off on this. We had more traditional backup options, in case they didn’t go for it. Some wouldn’t; we’d never push this on England. But we wanted this, so we went above and beyond to present it.
Another of our design directors here, a guy named Daniel Farron, got a team of designers across Nike and asked them, “We’ve got this kit, what else do we want to do?” He went about and helped build this whole collection using various designers to really build on the kit and create this energetic moment around Nigeria. Everyone here thought this was the craziest thing going here, this is mad. It just hit in the media and online, it just hit in the right moment where the stars aligned with a design that resonates with people. It was the right kind of thing to do at the time.
Often, you’re dealing with an older generation to get these kits signed off on, and they won’t always go for newer ideas, even if you know that’s the thing the kids will be into. Fair play to Nigeria though for letting us go for it. The results are amazing and Nigeria is now everyone’s second favorite team.
The 5 Most Beautiful Nigeria Shirts Ever
Like the iconic kits worn during the 90s and the 2018 masterpieceNever as today the Nigeria shirt has become one of the most hyped in the world, certainly because of the design of the penultimate kit, the one presented in 2018 before the World Cup. A clear tribute, revisited in a modern way, to the shirts worn by the African team in the 90s, impossible not to notice them during global events such as the 1994 and 1998 World Cups and the 1996 Olympics, when Nigeria was the main revelation, not only for the third place but for the absolutely original look.
From 1994 to today adidas and Nike have alternated as technical sponsor of the Super Eagles: the American brand, current official supplier of the Super Eagles, has just unveiled the new shirts, in which there is a very strong influence of local culture and traditions, and for this reason we decided to review the 5 most iconic kits worn by the players of the Nigerian squad in their history. United States, 1994 World Cup, Daniel Amokachi and Finidi George. The pattern of the Away shirt. At France '98, Nigeria dragged by Jay Jay Okocha, Nwankwo Kanu, Victor Ikpeba and Taribo West wins the its group but is then eliminated in the round of 16 from Denmark.
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