Anatomy of a kit: Inside the creation of Nike’s new 2025 NWSL jerseys and how they came to be

With the 2022 NWSL Championship in Washington, D.C. done and dusted after the Portland Thorns picked up another batch of winners’ medals, fans’ focus that winter quickly shifted to the excited and nervous wait for the next season. Any and all information – official or otherwise – about future players and new jerseys was welcome, with the countdown to the 2023 season already underway.

Nike and the NWSL’s creative brains were not focused on 2023, though; there were 2025 looks to discuss.

Such is the intricate process to create fresh designs for soccer teams, who debut at least one new jersey annually and aim to distinguish themselves not only from their competitors around the league but also stand out in a crowded sport – and the other sports that exist alongside them. The obsession from fans is matched by the people who are tasked with bringing these jerseys to life, who stay busy for the better part of two years to ensure each detail gets the team’s story across.

A Nike spokesperson told CBS Sports that the design process begins two years before the date of delivery and includes research, development, testing and more.

That is only a snapshot of the meticulous and somewhat secretive journey that a jersey goes on before it enters the public domain, hoping to add itself to the lengthy – but difficult to crack – list of kits that stand the test of time.

Fleshing out the ideas

The process formally starts approximately two years before a kit is launched, though creative directors are dreaming up ideas long before that. Angel City, for example, plot out their storytelling in five-year blocks, with this season’s jersey dropping in year four. Considering the ambitious plans for their 2025 secondary kits, Angel City needed to start the design process earlier than they had in the past and made first contact while holiday decorations were still up during the winter before the 2023 season.

“We actually started earlier than ever with the Nike process, which officially starts out when Nike and the NWSL send us requests for a briefing template that we fill out with them,” Angel City creative director Amedea Tassinari told CBS Sports. “By the time we got that briefing template from Nike, we already knew what our five-year plan was and we knew that this jersey was going to be unapologetically L.A.”

The briefing template includes considerations for “brand positioning, the players, the city, color, history and traditions,” per the Nike spokesperson. One of the more intriguing questions Nike asks clubs is how expressive they want their kits to be on a scale from zero to 10, a decision that can sometimes include leadership like the chief marketing officer, in the Houston Dash’s case. Angel City, meanwhile, had CEO Julie Uhrman involved as well as the community impact team to compile a list of 30 to 40 landmarks that was then whittled down to 19 different references to Los Angeles’ diverse culture.

The clubs can also submit a wide range of materials including mood boards, which the Dash did for their cosmic storm kits, and a 20-page document further explaining the story of the kit, in Angel City’s case.

“At Angel City, we’re always a little extra so added on, like, 20 pages to that,” Tassinari said. “We tacked on, what does it mean now to know Los Angeles authentically? … A lot of times, if you see commercials or [how] people who aren’t from L.A. think of our city, they’d think of the Walk of Fame, the Hollywood stars, they think of Santa Monica, they think of the downtown skyline, and that’s the visuals you’ll see, and so we said [for] a lot of us, it’s deeper than that. It’s more than that and it’s more intimate than that, that people don’t realize and a big part of that difference is that there’s not one heart of our city. There’s, like, hundreds of hearts.”

Angel City’s kit, aptly titled Los Angeles, is far from the only hyperlocal design that is part of this season’s batch of new looks. The Dash’s cosmic storm jersey includes a few nods to the city of Houston, some more obvious than others.

“Something we do really well with the Dash is represent the space city aspect of Houston, so we knew we wanted to go with the cosmic play,” Bryan Salas, the creative director for the Dash and MLS’ Dynamo, told CBS Sports. “We knew just playing on the little star on the Houston Dash crest, it’s kind of like a nod to Houston and the space city and all the innovation that goes into our city but overall, just like as Houstonians, as people who adopt this city, it’s for those people who are always looking to go beyond, always looking to do more bigger, better things.”

Choosing purple for the design was also a very strategic choice from Salas and his team, one for the “if you know, you know” crowd.

“Houston had a very big movement in U.S. hip-hop,” Salas said. “I think it started with DJ Screw with the chopped and screwed movement and one of the callbacks to his albums, he always used the purple color so that kind of set the tone for, I would call it, the Houston subculture. When there’s something cool and underground, those tones of purple get used. … We had this one artist here in Houston who developed that music genre and Beyonce, Travis [Scott], all these Houston natives have adopted it and it’s very cool to them to still call back to that artist, but I think just the color purple has been adopted by the subculture here. We got the slabs – slabs are the big cars you see with the wheels kind of poking out, super colorful.”

There’s another round of question-and-answer before the process shifts almost completely to Nike’s internal team.

“We brief, they give us a form to fill out,”  Tassinari said. “We fill out the form and add a bunch of pages, we brief them so it’s like a pitch back where we send, here’s what we filled out and here’s what we mean. They can ask follow-up questions, their designer is there, their colorist is there, etc., and then they go off and create for a little while.”

Bringing the designs to life

The pitch process allows Nike to gather as much information as they can before they begin to create kits that satisfy the club’s and the brand’s expectations. The main point of contact for the clubs is a designer assigned by Nike, while the entire design team leans on the club’s brief as well as their own research. The hometown pride was something each party leaned into – for the 2025 NWSL jerseys, Nike also did their own fact-finding on the colors and geography of each team’s home cities, while a wide range of specialists, and in the case of Angel City, the legal teams to make sure they had the all-clear on the local Los Angeles landmarks.

Nike’s design process alone takes a year, both to discuss the fine details of the kit with the clubs as it comes together and to include the company’s always-evolving innovations to ensure the jerseys accomplish their primary objective – being easy for players to compete in. That’s where athlete input and the more technical side of the company’s work come into play.

“Our kits feature Nike DRI-FIT ADV technology — Nike’s latest advanced-performance material innovation engineered for the body in motion,” the spokesperson said. “While creating the material for the new kits, our designers prioritized mobility, breathability and sustainability. They leveraged the latest advanced body-mapping technology, 4D data and state-of-the-art digital design tools to tune the material pixel by pixel, providing reinforcement, mobility, breathability and venting exactly where it’s needed most. The new jerseys and shorts for women footballers move sweat away from the skin for quicker evaporation — helping athletes stay cool, dry, comfortable and focused.”

The impactful subtleties of the performance-focused aspects of a jersey are reflected by the design process during the year that Nike spends putting a look together. The 2025 kits include little signals to each NWSL city, a particularly important element for the secondary jerseys that are inherently unique ways to represent a club.

“From the trim details on the neck and arm cuffs to the stitch color and graphic placement,” per Nike’s spokesperson. “With these away kits, we also made sure to include an ‘outer pride’ (an additional motto or logo selected by the team) to more personally reflect their community connections.”

Angel City has used the opportunity to use a new label reading “Los Angeles” in one of the bottom corners of their jersey, while the Dash have a hand throwing up the pointer and pinky fingers to replicate the letter “H,” commonly used by Houston residents. All the while, Nike is in touch with the clubs to hear their feedback – and offer some design ideas of their own.

“[Nike] pitched the idea of the toile and then we worked together to come out exactly with what that would look like,” Tassinari said about the Angel City kit. “We decided we want it to – it naturally has this vintage feel, being a toile pattern – lean into that vintage feel with the color-blocking on the sleeves and necklines and other elements like that, and then also have some modern elements, have it look like it’s tattoo-inspired in the design.”

At long last, Nike finally presents a few final designs before the clubs lock one in and once again take the lead on the last stage of the process.

The final touches

Nike collaborates with the NWSL on marketing, but at this point, introducing the jerseys to the world is almost entirely the responsibility of the clubs. The creative teams handle another set of small but important details, from the club’s official rollout on social media to how the kits will look on broadcast. They also go straight back to the beginning, connecting the original stories that inspired the brief and connecting it to the present day.

It can be hard to guess a team’s status two years out, but both the Dash and Angel City found easy ways to connect their sides’ current circumstances to the story they had envisioned.

“How we’re positioning Dash this season is like a whole new team – new players, new president of soccer, new head coach, and that’s kind of the idea behind the pattern of this jersey,” Sala said. “It’s called cosmic storm, so a cosmic storm is very much like that violent process that goes in the cosmos. It’s like a lot of pressure that goes into forming a new start.”

For Angel City, the process was a bit more emotional in the weeks after wildfires ravaged the Los Angeles area.

“This jersey was planned for two years,” Tassinari said. “It was always our love letter to L.A. That was always its thing. I remember after the fires happened, a couple of weeks after, we’re all getting back into our regular meeting schedules and things. We have a meeting about storytelling of the jersey, and we’d already written it before Christmas and before all that, and this was our time to revisit it and put it into action. We get onto this meeting before we enter the doc and we’re like, ‘Everything has changed. The world is different. Our lives as Angelenos is different and our city is in, deeply, a different place than it was,’ and then we open the doc and imagine we’re going to have to change everything, and we look at it, and we’re like, ‘The story’s there. This is the story.’

Angel City will use the kit as a springboard of sorts for other initiatives after the wildfires including launching a program called “Seats of Strength,” in which fans can donate tickets to people affected, as well as the first responders who blazed the fires. The kit can also be purchased with a “Rise Up L.A.” iron-on patch, proceeds from which will benefit the LAFD Foundation and the Women’s FIre Alliance.

And then, of course, the process starts right back up.

Gazing into the future

As the 2025 NWSL kits soak up the spotlight, the process to create the 2027 jerseys is up and running. The lengthy timeline forces questions about how each club’s branding will evolve over the next couple of years and how the jerseys will tell those stories. Creative teams will factor in a lot of things when making those calls, from the club’s own history to current events.

Angel City, for example, will celebrate their fifth year next season, capping off a five-year storytelling period in which the club introduced itself to the NWSL, the city of Los Angeles and to any global onlookers. The next five years will be less introductory, and could lean into a very important period for the Southern California city – and the sport of soccer itself.

“Things that we’re considering in that story is that the Olympics are coming to L.A. in 2028 – what does that mean for us and how do we show up on the global stage,” Tassinari said. “There’s Women’s World Cup in there, there’s the U.S. hosting the World Cup in ’26, including L.A. L.A. has a lot of big years for soccer in those five years, and a lot of big years — a lot of people are coming to L.A. for the Olympics, the World Cup, so L.A. sports are going to be on a global stage, both in the context of soccer and sports at large, and those are huge contexts to consider. “

The Dash, meanwhile, plan to embrace a new era for women’s sports after several successive years of undeniable growth.

“We’ve been established, we’ve been in Houston for 10 years so we kind of celebrated that and then just looking forward,as women’s sports keep growing and growing,” Salas said. “It’s not women’s sports, it’s just sports at this point and it’s Houston sports, so for us, that’s kind of what we’re thinking. … It’s even, ’26, it’s the men’s World Cup, ’27, women’s so just kind of thinking, in two years from now, what’s the sport going to be and just trying to get ahead of those trends.”