Nearly 25 years ago, MLS rolled out its inaugural class of uniforms during a fashion show at The Palladium, a now-shuttered, once legendary New York City nightclub. Lights danced across the stage as some of the league’s original stars showed off a series of garish, mid-’90s designs, some of which would go down in infamy. There was no sign of the nightclub’s signature visual element — a massive, beautiful mural by Keith Haring, which was hidden behind a blue curtain emblazoned with the word “unveiled,” in case partygoers forgot why they were there, and a video screen displaying MLS’s inaugural set of logos. You know, stuff like a fire-breathing horse and a “cyberbat.”

People had opinions on those kits. People have always had opinions on kits. And when Major League Soccer puts its 2020 collection on public display at a fashion show in New York City Wednesday night, people will once again offer up their criticisms.

Fans will spend hours looking at these uniforms throughout the course of the year, and some particularly passionate supporters will pay good money to wear the shirts themselves. The identity of the club they support, most would say, is woven into the fabric of these jerseys. Great designs go down in history, cherished by fans for years to come. Dreadful ones end up in the dustbin, trotted out on “worst-of” lists every few years.

Most fans, though, can agree on one thing: MLS’s kits have gotten much, much more boring over the years. It’s probably a good thing to an extent. More traditional, basic looks likely align MLS with many of the world’s elite leagues — the type that MLS is seeking to emulate.

Yet many of the league’s kits have felt soulless and lazy in recent years. Even the compliments people have tossed at these getups — sentences interspersed with adjectives like “clean” and “elegant” — feel like a stretch, like the person is bargaining with themselves or settling. If the best compliment you can offer a piece of clothing is that it’s essentially devoid of any design at all, what does that say about what you’re looking at?

Through all of this, one thing has remained confusing to the bulk of soccer fans in general, and MLS fans in particular: how much control do clubs really have over the design process of the kits they wear? When clubs roll out an all-white kit that basically looks like a plain T-shirt — aside from a few bespoke design touches on the inside of the collar — where can fans lay the blame? What follows is a guide that should help clarify some of the mysteries of how a new kit comes to be.

MLS’s design process starts nearly two years ahead of a particular kit’s release. According to Adidas, this year’s batch first hit the design table in March of 2018, a design process that started with MLS clubs submitting a presentation to the manufacturer with potential wants and needs.

“It’s a formal brief,” says Adidas senior license manager Riley Mahoney when reached via telephone on Tuesday. “They tend to be from 16-20 pages. We, along with the league, help (clubs) out with this process. So we show them the kits from years past; we talk about whether they’re launching a home or an away jersey. The team then goes out into their individual cities with their individual fan groups and provides us with a direction.”

That direction can be varied; it can be as simple as a “mood board” containing other kits and looks the teams like, or as esoteric as a collection of words and phrases associated with the club’s identity. Some clubs’ in-house designers also submit design prototypes or mock-ups of potential kits.

Their input to Adidas is also partly steered by a style guide of sorts that the manufacturer sends out to each club. A copy of the guide Adidas supplied to clubs in 2014, acquired by The Athletic, lays out questions to inform the design of 2016’s kits, like “what is the single most important story to convey through this jersey?” and “are there any sacred elements to the matchwear and identity?”

Often, there are certain elements of the kit that are simply non-negotiable, which may be laid out in this guide. This year, to mark MLS’s 25th anniversary, kits will include three diagonal stripes on the right shoulder, which is a nod to the manufacturer’s iconic kits of the early ‘90s. The v-neck collar is also suggestive of those earlier looks. Both the stripes and collar were required design elements. Every club had to operate with that particular template. For some clubs — in particular the league’s original teams — the three stripes feel like a nice nod to their history. For newcomers like Inter Miami… not so much.

The level of attention and care put into these initial talks and presentations — and the entire design process — is something that varies wildly from team-to-team, according to nearly every person associated with the process interviewed for this piece, most of whom spoke to The Athletic anonymously, for fear of risking future employment opportunities. Some of MLS’s larger clubs have a robust and accomplished design staff, while others fall on the leaner end of the spectrum.

“There’s definitely a higher level of detail from certain clubs when it comes to this initial brief and when it comes to the collaboration throughout the process,” says Mahoney.

There is also the issue of how much trust a particular team might put in their design staff. The staff within MLS front offices — and those across all professional sports, really — skew young, and designers at MLS clubs frequently fit that mold: young and relatively light on professional experience. But this doesn’t mean that their ideas are bad, as evidenced by the sizable crop of excellent work some of those same designers put out through their club’s social and content channels throughout the season.

What it does mean is that the upper-level decision makers at many clubs might find it difficult to put full faith in their own design staff when they have the option of using what’s assumedly a more experienced crew at Adidas. At some MLS clubs, promising designs are sometimes taken off the table. At DC United, for example, a cherry blossom themed kit by the club’s own designer was scrapped in 2018, as they instead opted for a plain white away kit — a decision that drew ire from many of the club’s fans.

“I think a lot of executives at MLS clubs are choosing not to put faith in their in-house design team,” said a senior designer who has been involved in multiple kit proposals. “Instead, they’re putting faith in a designer at Adidas in Germany who is furiously googling the local iconography of Columbus, Ohio, for example.”

That brings up an entirely different question, one raised by multiple interview subjects: why do upper-level team employees, many of whom possess little to no design experience to speak of, have any consequential say at all in the process?

Seemingly every designer who’s worked on an MLS kit has a story about an interloper. At Real Salt Lake in the mid 2010s, the club’s design team repeatedly tried to roll out blue shorts with their home kit, a return to RSL’s early looks. Despite the design earning league and manufacturer approval, executives at the club axed the look because they felt some on staff pushed for it out of an allegiance to former owner Dave Checketts, who sold his share of the club in 2013.

There are also stories of an owner with an aversion to one particular color (a color which happens to be closely associated with that club’s home city) and staffers thinking that some colors are too feminine. Just this year at DC United, the club’s plan to pair their black home shirt with red shorts has been the subject of debate at the club, with some who are directly involved in the design process being influenced by other long-time club employees.

People uninvolved in the process interjecting their sometimes ill-informed opinions on the subject, one designer joked, “is the story of the entire design industry.”

After the initial phase of design — the early brief and some back-and-forth between the club and manufacturer — Adidas takes the club’s suggestions and melds them with their own design direction. In 2020, the manufacturer’s general direction for much of its kit design is “the unity and art of football.” It smacks of Mad Men-infused corporate ad speak, but when you dig in a bit further, that overarching theme is present in most of the kits the company has produced this year. Spain’s Euro 2020 home kit, for example, is an absolutely gorgeous number that feels more like a modernist canvas than a shirt, with large swaths of different shades of pixelated reds broken up into rectangular sections.

Some similar artistic overtones come though in the details on each MLS kit. The LA Galaxy’s home shirt features a sash, as it has for several years, but this year it is a brushstroke. Minnesota United’s iconic NASL kits have made a comeback, as well — this time with a hand-drawn wing flaring up the front of the jersey; a nice departure from digital prints used in the past.

“This year we have a lot of hand-drawn graphics,” says Mahoney, “and a lot of brushstrokes. We’ve gotten away from some of the digital prints we’ve used in the past, to help bring football and the art of the beautiful game to life on these bespoke jerseys.”

With the year’s design philosophy and the initial brief in hand, designers at Adidas put together several options for each MLS club, at which point the club, if they so choose, can provide additional feedback. “From there we align on what we call a ‘CR0,’ which is really a (two-dimensional) CAD design,” says Mahoney.

At that point, clubs can provide additional input. Some do, some don’t. Many interviewed for this piece suggested that clubs in larger markets, where jersey sales are significantly higher, have a bit more leverage in the design process than smaller sides that may only sell 5,000-10,000 jerseys in an entire two-year jersey cycle.

Those big sellers may get an even larger platform in the future. According to multiple sources familiar with the situation, MLS is poised to allow a third kit next year for a handful of its best-selling clubs, an option clubs haven’t had for years. Those third kits, which briefly appeared in the mid-2010s, were phased out when they simply didn’t sell well enough — the same reason, one source said, the league did away with long-sleeved jerseys just last year. (Though it appears they have now returned.)

Regardless of the size of the club involved, Adidas is always largely behind the wheel throughout the design process. It’s certainly a collaborative process to an extent — “no kit will go to market without the club specifically signing off on the design,” Mahoney assures — but the manufacturer is opposed to giving any particular club the bulk of control in the creative process.

“We really try and shy away from that,” he says. “(Kit design) is really what we do. Our heritage has been in football and making football kits. The same six designers that work on MLS are the same designers you have working on the kits for Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Arsenal, the German national team, the Mexican national team. They also work on MLS.

“So this is really what they do, the meat and potatoes of what they live every day,” continues Mahoney. “We really discourage clubs from coming at us with an exact design because it may not fit with that seasonal direction we talked about. They may want a ham sandwich on a jersey, but that doesn’t fit into the ‘unity of art and football.’ We want to make sure we have a design inspiration that lives across all jerseys.”

The process as a whole has been frustrating to some designers at MLS clubs, particularly those who feel well-equipped to craft a look that represents their market well.

“There was a year where we submitted several designs,” said a former club employee involved in multiple kit design cycles. “They weren’t just ideas of other kits that we liked, but also designs from our own internal design team that we felt met the bullet points of the design that Adidas was trying to pursue — and they still just didn’t really fully accept it or adhere to that vision. I think if we had been moving more than (a small amount) of jerseys, maybe they would’ve paid more attention.”

Other, less considered factors sometimes come into play during the process — factors which Adidas considers itself better-equipped to deal with than any particular club’s design staff.

“There are limitations when you think of color migration, when you think of what we can actually do,” says Mahoney. “I’ll give you this example – a lot of clubs want to do gold jerseys. They want to do a gold fabric. Gold doesn’t execute. Everyone has this big envision of this gold popping on this shiny fabric, but when you put gold on a polyester it looks like sand. It looks brown. That’s not what we want. We know those ins-and-outs, we know those specifications, and that’s why we, at the end of the day, own the end design, but really try to collaborate with the clubs and the league.”

It goes without saying that some recent designs have underwhelmed, most notably the tidal wave of all-white kits in 2019. All but five MLS teams last year (Houston Dynamo, Sporting KC, Seattle Sounders, New York City FC and the Columbus Crew) had a primarily white kit of some sort. For some clubs, the move made sense — white was always a color associated with the team. For others, all-white was a much blander look, sometimes even a head-scratching one.The near-total saturation of white kits was caused by a multitude of factors, and demonstrates the difficulties faced by all parties involved in the design process. Major League Soccer, for example, requires that clubs have a uniform that’s 80% light-colored available. Clubs like DC United don’t have a light color in their official palette, so white became a viable, neutral option that doesn’t push against the club’s brand identity too strongly; one they’ve used in past years, as well. The lack of a third kit also prevents clubs from trying out riskier, lighter shades, and limits their options.

Adidas, though, is quick to push back against the suggestion that clubs lean on white as a cop-out, or a lazy design option, or even the suggestion that those kits are boring to begin with. There are other factors at play — kit sponsors, re-brands and the like.

“I think sometimes kits go to market and people see them as boring,” says Mahoney. “But that may be what the club wanted as the club is, for example, resetting their branding, or doing a color change, or bringing their kits to life in other directions through new pops of color in their sponsor logo, or through the adidas logo or three stripes. A lot of times it’s by design, it’s what they wanted. And then hopefully those clubs then have the marketing story, they’ve named their kit and done the things on the back end to bring that kit to life and make sure the fans understand their vision.”

About a year before the jersey release date, production is permanently locked in. The entire design process, Adidas says, is given the same level of detail the manufacturer gives to a club like Real Madrid, global giants that sell millions of jerseys a year.

“(MLS kits) get the same level of attention to detail,” Mahoney says. “The unique thing about MLS is that it’s the only league-wide deal. You think about the opportunity to create jerseys for 26 unique fan bases and teams, this league-wide deal gives our design team a little more freedom than some of the other leagues and clubs which have a little bit more history and have a little bit more heritage — those clubs and leagues are often a little more conservative in their designs.”

So who do you blame for a bad MLS kit? The answer isn’t a simple one.

If you’re disappointed in your club’s jersey, blame the club itself for not pushing hard enough, or maybe not having enough faith in their own designers, or failing to employ a competent one to begin with. Or be angry at Adidas for holding on to the wheel a bit too firmly, or insisting that certain design elements be included across all of the league’s jerseys. Or blame the league itself for eliminating teams’ ability to go out and have Kappa or Under Armour or any other number of design houses put together more individualistic looks for them by signing a league-wide deal with a single kit manufacturer.

Alternatively, just gaze longingly at some of this season’s stronger looks, like Minnesota United’s homage to their distinctive NASL kits, and keep calling the boring ones “clean.”

Most of all, just be thankful there are no more “cyberbats.”