Sunderland’s away shirt for the upcoming 2025-26 Premier League season has been leaked online.
Shared by @LowerTiers on X, the image shows a young model wearing the new-look away kit, which pays homage to Sunderland’s classic 1990 design. The shirt features a rich royal blue base with a geometric tonal pattern, white shoulder accents, and a retro-style white collar. White chevron trim also lines the sleeves and underarms.
Most notably, the shirt bears the logo of W88, a major Asian sports betting company, which appears as Sunderland’s new front-of-shirt sponsor. The W88 logo is printed prominently in white across the chest, sitting below the kit manufacturer’s emblem on the right and the Sunderland badge on the left.
W88’s sponsorship marks a significant commercial move for the club as they return to the Premier League. The company is no stranger to English football, having previously partnered with clubs including Aston Villa, Wolves, Fulham, and Crystal Palace.
While the club has yet to officially confirm the kit or the sponsor, the design and branding suggest this could be Sunderland’s second strip for the 2025-26 campaign. Fans will recognise the nod to the past with a faithful reinterpretation of the 1990 away shirt, which is widely considered one of the Black Cats’ most iconic looks.
The new shirt continues a successful collaboration with Hummel, who have been widely praised for their designs during Sunderland’s promotion-winning 2023/24 campaign. Last season’s trio of Hummel kits, home, away, and third, quickly became fan favourites. The bold retro red-and-white home shirt and white with turquoise away strip, particularly, have become iconic once more.
Since the switch from Nike in 2024, Hummel’s attention to heritage and detail has resonated strongly with supporters. The Danish brand has leaned into Sunderland’s rich visual identity while nodding towards the club’s iconic history.
“To really own what makes Sunderland special, the heart of soul of the football club and drive that through the whole business,” Sunderland’s COO David Bruce told The Echo last summer. “We probably haven’t been as good as we need to be in that area – I think everything begins and ends with what makes this club special and unique.
We need to define that and then live it through everything we do. What goes alongside that is being really ‘fan-centric’, that’s not an easy shift to make but it’s really important for a modern football club to obsess over the customer and the fan. “So it’s about making the business so that everything begins and ends with the fan. If you do that then we’ll have the chance to connect with fans on a level we’ve never been before. We’ve got an unbelievable fanbase that often defies logic, we still had 29,000 coming in League One – it beggars belief.
“I used to talk about that a lot when I was working in the United States, people couldn’t believe it. It’s because of that belonging which you just can’t buy overnight, the badge of honour of being a fan and seeing yourself in the football club. We’ve probably lost sight of that a little bit and taken advantage of that a little bit – and we can’t do that anymore,” he added.”