Following on from Everton’s shirt sponsor rankings over on our sister site — wrong club, but the format travels — here’s our own go at Man City home shirts, top ten, argued about by nobody who’ll actually agree with the order.
10. 2019-20 Puma launch shirt
Puma’s first go, and it showed. A perfectly serviceable sky blue shirt nobody particularly hated and nobody particularly remembers either, mostly notable now for starting the current — and considerably more expensive — kit deal.
9. 2013-14 Nike home
The first Nike kit after the Umbro years, sky blue with navy trim, competent enough but arriving in that slightly awkward period of adjusting to a new manufacturer’s template.
8. 1994-96 Umbro home
A shirt more people remember for the era than the design — City bouncing between the top flight and relegation trouble, with a kit that had the good grace not to be the worst thing about those seasons.
7. 2025-26 Puma “sash” home
The first time the sash — that diagonal stripe usually reserved for away shirts, going back to Summerbee and Colin Bell in the ’70s — made it onto the home kit. Divisive, but ranked here as the compromise pick.
6. 2026-27 Puma gradient home
Too new to know how it’ll be remembered, but the gradient design is a genuinely different idea for a City home kit, rather than another reprint of the classic template. Ask again in five years.
5. 2017-18 Nike “Centurions” home
The shirt worn to 100 points, still the Premier League record. Not the most adventurous design Nike ever produced, but it doesn’t need to be — the football wearing it did the work.
4. 1968-69 Umbro home
The old-school one. Simple sky blue, no sponsor, the shirt City lifted the FA Cup in back in 1969. The shirt every “classic kits” list has to include, and for once, deservedly so.
3. 2018-19 Nike domestic treble home
Premier League, FA Cup and League Cup, all in the same shirt — the first English men’s club to manage the domestic clean sweep. Underrated next to flashier entries here purely because three trophies in one kit tends to get overshadowed.
2. 2011-12 Umbro home
Sergio Agüero, 93:20, added time against QPR, the most dramatic title decider English football has produced. If you own exactly one City shirt from the archive, the data suggests it’s this one.
1. 2022-23 Puma home
The Treble shirt. Premier League, FA Cup, Champions League, Pep in Istanbul, the lot. Not the most inventive design City have worn, but design was never going to win this argument — history did, comfortably.
Honourable mention to Saab, City’s first-ever shirt sponsor back in 1982, for reasons that have nothing to do with the football and everything to do with how strange it is, in hindsight, that a Swedish car company got there before Etihad ever did.
