The football kit is an interesting beast. At its most basic level, it is a uniform: a coherent signal to audiences that defines and divides your team from opponents.A classic red versus blue scenario. As more football teams were founded, which then coalesced into leagues, it became necessary to have more colours. Patterns were introduced, shades were selected as symbols of community. Black and white stripes for the logo of the company the team played under, squared kits to echo the square of a coat of arms. Kits became an expression of who you were, where you came from, and what you believed in.
This is true even more so for supporters than for players. Wearing your kit is a showcase of your heritage, your history, your personhood. Each season, clubs and kit companies release freshly designed kits, altering small details to create unique and exciting shirts for the next season of players. It symbolises a sweaty mix of new prospects, historic pasts, and the capitalistic urge to milk your audience for all their worth. National teams do the same, designing new kits for major tournament cycles as if to say: ‘This is our year’. Australia recently announced their new kit for the 2025-2026 cycle, and it is a stunner. Gone are the days of the classic all gold shirt with green trim, reminiscent of a colonial cricketers garb accidentally put into the coloureds wash. This is a new beast altogether.
Vivid streaks of neon green and yellow strike down the shirt like lightning bolts, vertical zigzags of colour and shape. They feel quick, as if aesthetically designed to make our players more aerodynamic, slicing through the air and opponents. Bold lines containing a three-tone dark green, light green, and pale yellow gradient have dragged Australia into the modern age of fashion and design.This ain’t your grandpa’s soccer jersey.
Who can be credited with the reinvention of the Australian Football jersey? None other than Reko Rennie, a prominent Australian artist and the first Indigenous Australian to ever design a playing kit for Football Australia. Not only is Rennie the first Indigenous Australian artist to design a regular playing kit (as opposed to specialist kits created for the Indigenous Round in Australian sports), but this is also the first kit to feature the First Nations flag in the inner pride position of the kit, that is on the inside of the neck.
With a 2024 major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) entitled ‘REKOSPECTIVE’, and GQ’s Artist of the Year 2024, Rennie is one of the most interesting contemporary artists currently operating in Australia. His work mixes traditional Kamilaroi iconography into contemporary practices of art making, envisaging immersive installations that span sculpture, painting, wall art, and more. It pays respect to the lands and culture he grew up with, both as a First Nations Australian and as a young man on the streets of Melbourne, using graffiti and street art to express himself.
The product of this is the vivid, block lines on display in the new Football Australia kits. The zig-zagging lines are a constant motif within Rennie’s work, calling back to the linework often viewed on First Nations message sticks. Speaking about the design, Rennie said “The chevron patterning honours the world’s oldest living continuous culture… It’s a very important symbol of our identity and the history of this country, and it needs to be acknowledged.”
Merged with a contemporary take on the green and gold, the kit becomes a symbol for unity, hope, and progress. A bringing together of culture, between First Nations and colonial Australian identities, between traditional and contemporary art forms, and also of the historically disparate fields of art and sport. Australia has a multicultural history, and this is a kit designed to showcase it to the fullest extent.
Major exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art are becoming more common (the NGV Bark Salon, Art Gallery of NSW First Nations Collection, and Miwatj Yolŋu Sunrise People at Bundanon, to name a few). Archie Moore’s success at the Venice Biennale, and a commercial focus on contemporary indigenous practice indicates an exciting next step for the growth and support of contemporary First Nations practice within Australia.
It is also incredibly exciting to see a prominent Australian artist showcase his work on such a stage. Art in the Western canon has always been associated with class and status. Museums were created as monumental totems to the power and wealth of empire. Symbols of elitist culture, they cater to a the ‘upper classes’ lacking both the broad appeal and cultural diversity sport offers. In 2023-24, the MCA, AGNSW, and Powerhouse Museums reported a total attendance of roughly 3.25 million visitors combined. In comparison, the 2023 Women’s World Cup Semi Final between the Matildas and England reached a viewership of over 11 million Aussies, or just under half of the total Australian population.
Sport has the power to captivate and inspire people who might never care about the art on gallery walls. There is something that rivals the emotive force art contains. Sitting behind the goal in the 60th minute of that infamous semi-final, watching the net bulge as Sam Kerr struck a Puskas-nominated goal, I was brought to tears by the sheer emotion flooding my body and the stadium surrounding me. To bring First Nations art into this space, to hold up the art of Reko Rennie as we hold up our sporting heroes, to inspire Indigenous Australians and athletes, to showcase the progress of the sport, and how inclusive it can be.
This jersey is a celebration of Indigenous culture and of football, but also of the importance of the arts and of the power it has to inspire. In a time where more and more artists are questioning the role of gallery spaces, where arts funding is at a critical breaking point, and artists are struggling to make a living putting work into the world, seeing a prominent indigenous artist creating meaningful art that can be worn, treasured, and believed in, is something worth championing.
