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Aston Villa kits likely leaked three days before launch

Images of Villa’s new kit for 2016/17 are floating around — and this time, it looks like these are the real deal.

By Alexander Carson
Aston Villa FC

We’d been getting a couple nuggets from the club by way of teasers — a recap of that here — but it looks like we’ve finally gotten our first full look at Aston Villa’s new Under Armour shirt for the 2016/17 season, by way of Footy Headlines.

So, before we start talking about the kit itself, let’s establish why this is almost certainly the kit. Everything we’ve seen leaked so far matches up with these shirts — the button-up collar on the home kit, the V-neck on the away one, the light blue upper chest on a white shirt and the proper-looking outlines to match what’s been leaked, and if that wasn’t enough, Footy Headlines are usually pretty reliable when it comes to kit news.

Realistically, there’s no reason to doubt these are the new Villa kits. So onto the design…

The home kit looks pretty unoffensive here. It’s a button-up collar, which really is pretty rare for Villa, but something that should give the kit a "classy" feel heading into the new term. We don’t know what the back looks like yet, though they’d need to try to screw up this kit if they wanted to. The thing that concerns me a little is this line from the Footy Headlines post…

White shorts and claret socks are expected to complete the new Aston Villa jersey.

In my eyes, the best thing Macron did with Villa for four years was to put the club in hooped socks, so if those go away, that’ll be a little disappointing. What’s more disappointing is the idea of solid claret, not blue, socks. I’ve always felt that’s more of a West Ham thing than a Villa thing, and the stats show it — we’ve only worn claret socks six times in the last 45 seasons, and two of those coincided with a year where we weren’t wearing claret and blue shirts and white shorts.

A look at the sleeve cuffs also indicates the teaser video the club unveiled earlier is likely of a training kit. That’s a little odd — a training kit that looks like the on-pitch home one doesn’t make sense to me — but comparing that collar and the sleeve cuffs to the one on the back of St. Pauli’s training shirts (a fellow new UA club) makes a match.

As for the away kit, it looks like an homage to the 1997/98 away kit, one of my favourite Villa efforts. I would expect blue shorts with this one, which would likely look really good, and probably white socks. No matter the pairing, this should be good and a much better effort than last year’s away kit, easily the weakest of Macron’s four efforts.

The biggest concern in my eyes for this one is the collar, which looks to share the same funky design as AZ’s home kit for the coming term.

It’s one of those design elements that’ll be tough to evaluate until we see it in action, but other than that, this away kit looks promising.

So in short, everything matches up with what we know and have seen so far — meaning these are likely the Villa kits for the new term. How do you like them? Let us know in the comments!

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