UPDATE: After a week from the beginning of the World Cup many Twitter users calls out adidas for the readability of the jersey fonts. Here some example:

japan living in 3018 pic.twitter.com/Ibu47zZqtA — Dank Memes (@FreeMemesKids) 19 giugno 2018

The font for these Adidas numbers is shocking. 11 or 17 or 77. (Obviously not 77 in the World Cup but still) pic.twitter.com/TyM9D7Rm0k — Craig Williams (@craigawilliams) 15 giugno 2018

World Cup Font Letters from Adidas Kits are from the Dead! pic.twitter.com/a7dgcb357K — ScorpioX (@ScorpioHyper) 19 giugno 2018

I am fully on board with this Adidas font for #BEL turning Mertens into MEATENS pic.twitter.com/50n8jiujKQ — Brody Logan (@BrodyLogan) 18 giugno 2018

What are the must-have qualities that a football shirt font should have? It must be stylish, sticking to FIFA's myriad rules of size and visibility and - last but not least - must be readable. Here is the font created by adidas for the national jerseys that will go to Russia to play the 2018 World Championship seems to satisfy the first two criteria, but not the most important that is the last one. On Twitter, the photo of Julian Draxler's Germany shirt went viral, whose surname seems to lend itself to various interpretations due to the squared shapes of the design.

This perfectly illustrates the problem about this “typeface”.

Thanks, Julian …

OAAXLEA?

DARKLER?

ORAHLEA?

DAAHLER?

ORAXLER?

ORAHLER?

DRAXLER?

OARHLEA?

DAAXLEA?

OAAHLER?

DARXLER?

OARXLEA?

ORAXLER?

DRRXLER?

DRAHLEA?

DRRHLER?

ORAXLEA?

OAAXLER?

ORRHLER?

DARHLEA? pic.twitter.com/YqJIyIpxyw — sportsfonts.com (@sportsfonts_com) 20 marzo 2018

The adidas font for the 2018 World Cup has a squared style, inspired by the Cyrillic alphabet and the Soviet aesthetic of the years. The shapes of the letters and numbers have no curves, only 90-degree angles (with three exceptions: X, V, and Z). A line passes in the middle of the numbers, reducing a little the "weight" of the figure, while the letters remain full. The problem of readability is caused precisely by the edges in the letters: the X, the H, the R, the K, the A, the D and the O confoundedly clash, while the Z is identical to the number 2.