By Jim Hearson
- MOJ note: Jim had this written ages ago, the delay is due to our illustrations.
There’s not a lot you can do with a plain white shirt. Keep on churning them out with a slightly different trim and people moan. Add some extra colours or subtle designs and people moan (some more than others).
Fortunately for Ghana, Puma have gone for the complete opposite of subtle at the World Cup 2026 and it’s utterly glorious.
The Black Stars adopted white as their first-choice kit upon Ghana’s independence in the late 1950s, given the colour’s connotations with peace and purity.
Of course, around that time, there was also a quite large European club team that wore all-white and the link between the sides was cemented in 1962 when Real Madrid played out a 3-3 draw in Accra, after which, Santiago Bernabéu presented President Kwame Nkrumah with a club badge.
By that stage, Madrid had already scooped their first five European Cups, and the all-white livery proved similarly successful for Ghana, winning Afcon on both their first and second entries in 1963 and 1965. Two more victories in 1978 and 1982 followed, but at the start of the 1990s, a change came – and not for the better.
It was decided that the yellow of the Ghanaian flag should become the hero colour, with pan-African bedfellows green and red as trim. A fine idea, but it didn’t work on the pitch – the best they could do in Afcon was runner-up in 1992, ultimately failing to qualify in 2004. The kit may not have been the reason for the lack of success, but after Puma picked up the manufacturing baton in 2005, white became the favoured hue once more…until this year, apparently.
Despite the white shirt being launched and retailed as the first choice, the Black Stars have chosen their yellow kit to take precedence at the World Cup, with it being worn in all three group games. As the notional away team to England and Croatia, the yellow would have been worn more than the white, but you’d think that white would have been fine against the red of Panama – probably preferable for people with colour-blindness.
Still, there will be a white kit in the Ghanaian kitbag, so we can circle back to the original concern – what to do with it? In the early years, sublimating one or more black stars onto the kit was the chosen solution, before 2014’s kit brought back the colours of the flag to the collar and cuff in a traditional Ghanaian kente-inspired pattern. For me, it’s Ghana’s best Puma home shirt until the new white shirt – the lack of colour really makes the details pop.
Unfortunately, Puma’s designers seemingly took the next six years off, before the aforementioned handwoven cloth design came back in a big way in 2020. Effectively a white and grey body with white and black sleeves, it was a huge departure from what had gone before, and was all the more satisfying for the away kit repeating the pattern in yellow, black and green.
Like good farming practice, the shirt was left fallow again for the next couple of iterations, save the Black Stars’ eponymous symbol worn proudly on the chest. Then, like rested fields that have naturally replenished their nitrates, the 2026 emerged and, woah boy, it’s the most bountiful crop in years.
Puma’s unfussy template offers a clean canvas to create on, and create they have, alongside Ghanaian artist Prince Gyasi. The eponymous black star remains, but stringing off it is a spiderweb design, complemented by the Adinkra symbols familiar to the Akan people of Ghana.
Unlike others in football who have worn web-inspired shirts and masks as a nod to Spider-Man, Ghana’s usage relates to Kwaku Ananse, the part-man, part-spider of West African folklore. I wouldn’t say mythology is particularly my strong suit, but I had actually heard of the mischievous character thanks to American Gods on Prime, so the reference wasn’t totally lost on me on first hearing.
Ghana may need to perform like deities in the US to match or improve upon their best finish of the last-eight in 2010, and if we’re to see this kit at all, they need to at least make it out of the group stage… and we know that yellow hasn’t exactly been the harbinger of success for them in previous years.
