First Thoughts On Reading’s 2025/26 Home Kit

Alex has his say on the Royals’... interesting new home kit.

They’ve certainly kept us waiting compared to last year’s early release, but here it is: our new home shirt for the upcoming 2025/26 season! And let me tell you, it’s a thought-provoker.

So much so that the accompanying piece which will follow this one was supposed to be the only kit-related article. However, I just had so much to say.

I wonder: how many people saw this and their initial instinct was to rub their eyes? It just doesn’t look like a Reading kit at all. It took me a while to figure out why – but firstly, it’s the white. There’s just so much white. So very much of it.

I know there’s a discourse where some fans say our kit is blue with white and others white with blue, and that’s fine because, largely, the ratio has always been relatively evenly balanced. But my word, there’s just so much white.

It’s almost like looking at, I don’t know, a Derby County or Sheffield Wednesday kit. I know Derby are white and black and Wednesday are stripes, but it just doesn’t feel like a Reading kit.

Then I had some time to reflect. Sure, I could have been doing my day job, but nope. My commitment to journalistic integrity meant that I sat there, hand on chin, pondering the deeper questions of Reading’s kit and its DNA. And after some extensive pondering, I realised that the shock was wearing off a bit, and I kind of liked it. However, objectively like I might think that Crystal Palace’s FA Cup-winning kit was rather good.

It has a good collar, for starters. And a good collar is always important. The sleeves have the hoops extended to them too, like the kits from ye olden times and that’s always a win. It’s a little bit different too, and I respect that.

Since we get three new kits each year and the home kit rarely provides much wiggle room for experimentation, Macron have done well to come up with something a bit different by giving the nod (or, frankly, an exaggerated wink and elbow nudge) to Huntley & Palmers.

But that’s as far as I will go with the praise there, for inventiveness.

I am, for one, getting a little tired of kit designers convincing us to spend our hard-earned cash by coming up with endlessly dreary backstories about how such and such kit design taps into such and such community values blah blah whatever. Fine, we get it, but don’t overplay your hand because we know that Macron likely don’t care about Reading the town, and possibly even couldn’t find it on a map.

As well as this, at some point you’re going to run out of ideas about Reading town for inspiration. It will only be a few years down the line before we have a kit inspired by Smelly Alley and then an away kit inspired by the Whitley Whiff. Not that Reading smells, I should add. It’s a perfectly fragrant town.

Anyway – where was I? Ah, yes. The kit.

After the initial shock, and then the “hmmm… actually?”, the problem comes back around in full view again when you see the home shirt paired with the blue shorts and blue socks.

It’s almost like those designing the kit at Macron are aware it’s a little bit too white, and have tried to counterbalance this with making up for it in the items which complement the shirt. Which... sure, OK, that’s one approach, but they’ve stitched (pun not intended, but I’ll take it) themselves up here. How?

The colour of the blue on the shorts and socks: that’s Reading’s blue. We have a very distinctive blue. Always have done.

Not only is the shirt too white, but this pale blue makes the shirt even whiter than it already was, which – I don’t know if I had mentioned already – is a bit white. Why on earth couldn’t they have used the darker, normal Reading blue?

Did someone forget to pay the fabric bill and they had to scrape together the leftovers? It boggles the mind. It does also make a whole lot of sense that the promotional video didn’t feature the aforementioned socks and shorts, because surely the participants would have questioned it. And if they didn’t, the viewers would have.

The gut feeling that I have for this kit is that it won’t go down in the annals of time as one of the Reading greats, which is a shame given last season’s very good effort. But it isn’t inherently bad either – once our eyes have adjusted, I think we could, as a fanbase, grow to tolerate it. And that’s fine.

I’m keen to see what the away kit will look like, given that last season’s red effort is, might I say, probably the best away kit we’ve ever produced. Yep, better than the Simod Cup one.

Then I saw a comment online about the home kit resembling a Wetherspoons plate and now I can’t unsee that comment when I look at the shirt. Sigh. Fingers crossed for a better effort with the away one.