MLS 2024 Kit Leak & the Struggle of Keeping Irresistible Secrets
A lot of folks’ hard work was unfortunately undercut, but ultimately fans should celebrate getting an early eye on their clubs’ fresh looks
Have you ever had to keep a really big secret? What was the hardest part?
Everyone has their own place on the Vault Spectrum when it comes to protecting privileged information. Personally I’m proud to be someone friends can and do trust with their secrets, and I will fiercely guard the privacy of those who put their faith in me not to say anything about anything, when needed.
Now, having said that…I’m also an incorrigible gossip with 20+ years as a working journalist. Telling stories is my stock in trade, and I know as well as anyone: the best stories are the ones nobody has heard before.
Like I said, there’s a Spectrum.
For Major League Soccer, dealing in esoteric information is part and parcel to following the league. Don Garber’s Regime lives on the far end of the Secrets Scale in everything they do. Deals that all parties seemed to agree on get nixed by the league office without comment, we’ll never truly know how franchise expansion decisions get finalized, and every few months a new “Ultimate MLS Salary Rules Explainer” video pops up on YouTube with totally new information than the last one.
MLS loves its secrets.
Which brings us back to our question off the top…what’s the hardest part of keeping a really big secret? For me there’s two answers: People & Time. The more people who know and the longer they need to keep things quiet, the more trouble you’re in.
This weekend gave us a dramatic object lesson of that maxim, as the lid popped off a multi-year MLS shirt design/release process that dragged on a few weeks too long and definitely brought a few too many folks into the circle of trust.
MLS shirt designs aren’t just whipped up in the time between seasons, they’re plotted out, approved, and sent into production years in advance. Earlier this month on FanTV (weeks before this leak) Charlotte FC President Joe LaBue noted that the 2025 shirt is already locked and loaded, and they are currently working on the 2026 edition. There are entire marketing campaigns built around the rollout of these designs, it’s a big deal and for some club employees it’s one of the biggest parts of their jobs…leaks are rare and if they come they usually come just a few days before the release became official anyway.
For those reasons and more, I could hardly believe what I saw crossing my timeline when I woke up on Saturday morning:
“Oh Boy…there those guys go again, trollin’ with the emoji tweets.” I chuckled to myself as I kept scrolling and moved on. I didn’t think there was any chance they actually had the goods this time. New kits generally come out publicly in mid-Feburary, last year there was a leak of the Crown Jewel kit a few days early from sporting goods store employees putting on the sales racks, but I thought this was way too early to get anything for real.
What I didn’t count on were the video game producers behind EAFC 24 turning into SNL’s Sue the Surprise Lady:
See when it comes to that multi-year rollout process I mentioned earlier, one little detail involves getting digital versions of the new kits created as assets in EAFC. For whatever reason this year, EA got antsy and accidentally put a couple dozen of the new kits online, including Charlotte FC’s. TopBin and a few others Saturday morning figured it out and the screenshots soon spread all over social:
After the digital version screenshots started emerging, people took the ball and ran with it, and because we’re blessed to have creative people like Zachary Branham in the CLTFC fanbase, it wasn’t even a few hours later we had these slick Unofficial Renderings of what the leaked picture might look like in 3-D…and folks they look freaking good.
Again the renderings above are NOT official, but since the club itself tweeted a meme celebrating the digital screenshot, I’m taking that as tacit acknowledgement that this design is real, and spectacular.
Instantly iconic as the “Blue Ridge Kit,” this thing just SCREAMS Carolina. You can take the four gradient shades of blue as a direct reference to the mountain landscapes that grace our northern border or a more symbolic allusion to Carolina’s regional features: Mountains, foothills, piedmont, coast. In any case it’s a great look that should be fantastic on the pitch regardless of the color they choose for the bottom to go with it…tho I’d be partial to white shorts to go with this top, myself.
Initial reaction to these leaks termed them a “PR disaster,” and I understood the instinct to go that way. Like I said people at the clubs and with the league work on these projects for years. It sucks to see their work undercut and lose some of its surprise factor. I know what it’s like to create content and work on it behind the scenes until you’re ready to release it, and any time that process gets interrupted from the way a designer plans it out, there’s tension and stress.
On the other hand, if you’ll allow me to quote my podcast partner John Hayes: “Soccer is for the Fans.” The truth of the matter is that the long, multi-year process I keep talking about is a little too long and a little too multi-year.
The truth is we’ve been given no good reason why these kit designs get held so late and not released until right before the season starts, and maybe this bigtime leak will give the league a strong push in the direction of releasing them much earlier in the future, like in time for holidays, maybe?? Like I keep harping on, the designs are done, they’re ready to go…roll ‘em out already!
More truth: we don’t really need to hear the stories behind all the tiny design element details of every single nanometer of a new kit. It’s nice, but a lot of that stuff is super obvious…we get it. Kits just need to look cool and we will love them, and no inspirational story about why a terrible kit looks terrible is going to make it start flying off the shelves. A great soccer shirt sells itself.
Here’s hoping this weekend’s leak incident spurs MLS to make some big changes and speed up this process in the future, because far from being a PR Disaster, this news has only served to make fans all over the league get more hyped up and more ready to go for the new season. It would be nice to get that dopamine rush earlier in the year more regularly, so stop waiting ‘til February to give us the goods.
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With apologies to Peter Falk…I’ve got one more thing.
By far….By FAR… the dumbest thing to emerge out of this entire leaking affair this weekend was the chirping that came our way from those heathens across the Blue Ridges, over in Tennessee. One Knoxville SC apparently are the only club who’s ever allowed to use a special pattern on their shirts to represent the mountains, I guess?? They certainly seem to think so:
Several posts went out from Knoxville fans and supported by that club’s social admins whining that the new CLT design is “copying the homework” of Knoxville’s 2022 shirt design, and they obviously appear very similar, at least until we see the official drop from our side.
All I can say is that…once again…this is a multi-year process and the kit we’re about to see dropped by Charlotte FC was finalized and approved before the Knoxville one ever saw the light of day. There is no copying here as far as we can deduce, just a fairly simple (but very effective) artistic concept independently sparked in the minds of two different design teams.
There are also earlier ancestors of this type of design concept in things like the Slovenian national team shirts which reflect that country’s mountainous character:
In short, your objection is overruled, One Knoxville SC, so get over it. You didn’t invent putting mountain landscapes on jerseys and neither you nor us will be the last ones to do it. We’ll see y’all here in the QC on March 16th for a USL League 1 season-opening beatdown courtesy of the Charlotte Independence…make sure you wear clean shirts.
As far s kits releases go, my guess is that MLS wants to allow their partners to divest of as much inventory as possible before the new kits are released. Timing is tricky given the holidays, which is why we see so many 50% off sales this time of year.