Every four years the World Cup gives us a new set of shirts to fall in love with, and a few of them never leave. At Nostalgic Football Shirts we spend our days with kits from the seventies, eighties, nineties and two thousands, and the same names keep coming up whenever we talk about the greatest of all time. With the 2026 World Cup across the United States, Canada and Mexico now in full swing, and 48 nations involved for the first time, it felt like the right moment to write them down.
These are the shirts that defined their tournaments, ranked by nothing more scientific than the way they make us feel.
Brazil 1970: the yellow that became the colour of football
You cannot start anywhere else. Brazil won the 1970 World Cup in Mexico playing some of the most beautiful football ever filmed, and because it was one of the first tournaments broadcast widely in colour, that golden yellow shirt with green trim and blue shorts reached the whole world at once. Pelé, Jairzinho, Carlos Alberto and that fourth goal in the final against Italy turned a simple kit into a symbol. To this day, when someone draws a footballer, they often reach for yellow. You can browse our Brazil vintage football shirts to see how the canary yellow evolved across the decades.
Netherlands 1974: Total Football in orange
The Dutch did not win in 1974, but their shirt is remembered more fondly than most winners. Total Football under Rinus Michels, with Johan Cruyff at the heart of it, made the orange adidas kit a statement of how the game could be played. There is also a lovely collector detail here: Cruyff had a personal contract with Puma, so he refused to wear adidas's three stripes. The Dutch federation persuaded adidas to make him a special version with only two stripes on the sleeves, which is why photos of that team show one player slightly out of step with the rest. For us in the Netherlands it remains the most romantic shirt of all. Have a look at our Netherlands vintage football shirts.
Argentina 1986: Maradona's masterpiece
Argentina's light blue and white stripes are iconic in any year, but 1986 in Mexico is the one. This is the shirt Diego Maradona wore against England when he scored both the Hand of God and the Goal of the Century within four minutes. A detail collectors love: the shirt worn that day was a lighter version sourced in a hurry by the kit staff in Mexico, and one of those match shirts later became one of the most expensive football shirts ever sold at auction. Explore our Argentina vintage football shirts and the wider South American nations.
West Germany 1990: the chevron everyone copied
Few shirts are as instantly recognisable as the West Germany 1990 home shirt. That bold black, red and gold geometric chevron sweeping across the chest, made by adidas, looked like nothing before it. The team backed it up by winning the final against Argentina in Italy, and the design has been reissued, referenced and imitated ever since. If you grew up in the nineties, this is probably the first kit you doodled in the margins of a schoolbook. See what we have in our Germany vintage football shirts.
Italy and France: two home stories
Italy gave us some of the cleanest azzurri blue shirts of all, from Paolo Rossi dragging the team to the title in Spain in 1982 to the unforgettable summer of Italia 90. France then wrote their own home fairytale in 1998, when Zinedine Zidane scored twice with his head in the final against Brazil and the adidas shirt with its tidy collar became part of a national celebration. Two countries, two home tournaments, two shirts that meant everything. Browse our Italy and France vintage football shirts.
Spain 2010 and Portugal's golden generation
Closer to our own era, Spain finally got their hands on the trophy in 2010, beating the Netherlands in the final and rewarding a generation of tiki-taka with a deserved star. Portugal, meanwhile, gave us some of the most stylish kits of the two thousands as a golden generation came through. You can find both in our Spain and Portugal vintage football shirts.
Own a piece of the story
What makes these shirts special is not just the design, it is the memory attached to them. Every shirt we sell is a genuine vintage piece, a single unique item in one size, so when one finds a new home it is gone for good. If reading this has you reaching for a particular summer, start with our full national team football shirts and see which piece of World Cup history is still waiting for you.
Written by Tijs, co-founder of Nostalgic Football Shirts.
