If you’ve started a football team or just joined a recreational one and you’re looking to get yourselves kitted out in your own kit, here’s our guide.
Now the reality is that for new teams that come under the banner of an existing grassroots club, there’s likely already a kit designed and a kit supplier in place. But if you’re an independent team just looking for a kit for your match days and friendlies without the backing of a club with existing processes, where do you begin?
Let’s take a look at the quickest and easiest way to make your own custom football kit.
Have you got a team or club logo?
If you’ve got one, then great. You’ve pretty much got everything you need to get custom kit designed and ordered.
If you haven’t then you have a couple of choices:
- You could hire a designer to come up with one for you
- Design it yourself if you have exceptional design skills!
- Use a system like Canva to help design one
- AI systems like Midjourney (which we used for our tongue in cheek AI designed kits piece) can help inspire a logo
I just put AI (Midjourney and ChatGPT) to the test here and asked it design me a logo for a new football team. Here are a few examples of what I got without giving it any guidance on colour or theme, for a fictitious team I just invented called “Greenfield FC.”
These are never perfect and AI is absolutely AWFUL at putting letters onto logos. So these would serve as inspiration rather than a final design.
Getting Your Logo on a Shirt
If it’s as simple as a club logo on a shirt that you want, one potential cost cutting exercise is simply having the logo printed on plain technical sports t shirts.
You can buy iron custom logos and buy shirts separately.
But if you want to get into more customisation than this, a custom football kit design platform or provider is probably useful.
Custom Football Kit Providers
There are loads of kit suppliers out there ranging from small independents to the likes of Nike (but Nike really focusses its custom offering through other retailers and aims it at bigger grassroots clubs).
Generally, kit providers will either:
- Let you design your shirt online using their “templates” and an online customisation offering
- Ask you to send the art work for your logo and they’ll send you designs back
Some examples of providers include Pendle Sports and also Decathlon.
Big shout out here for Decathlon’s custom football kit builder! It’s so easy to use and lets you put together a massive range of designs from their existing templates, send them off easily to their team and then order and shirts are under £15 each at the time of writing (minimum order on the first order of 10 I believe) inclusive of printing.
Here’s an example of one I knocked up in minutes on their platform:
Very easy with loads of different design options.
But ultimately you’ll need to just find the right provider for you.
Funding It
You have a couple of options. You could find a sponsor who would benefit from having their logo on your shirt (or more than one sponsor if you prefer) or each player in your team could pay for their own shirt!
And that’s pretty much it – the absolute easiest way I have ever found to design custom football kits for your team!
