Beer-tastic World Cup Jerseys: Group B

By Nick Sindt

Here we are! Under two weeks to the greatest sporting spectacle the world has ever seen. No... not the monster truck rally at your local convention center. The World Cup! The pageantry, the globe's greatest teams and players, the crazed and delusional fans (looking at you, England).

But what about the team's jerseys? Every four years, and sometimes even more frequently, the National teams of nearly every country roll out new threads for materialistic consumers to salivate over and spend their hard earned dollars, yen, Euros, etc on.

How will you ever sort through all of them to decide which jersey you'll treasure for the next month?

Worry no more! The Free Beer Movement's Nick Sindt is going to walk you through all 32 teams' home and away jerseys and rate them based on (what else?) beer!

Yesterday we tackled: Group A

Here’s how the ratings will work; I’ll be ranking each kit on its design/uniqueness and purchasability (from a home fan’s standpoint) and the rankings will of course be done in beers as follows:

John Smith’s Extra Smooth = An Excellent design that deserves to be toasted with a fine beer; you don’t need to pound these back to look at it, but it’s beer and it’s the World Cup so we know you’re going to.

Summit [Insert Local Brewery Name Here] Extra Pale Ale = A solid design though it may not satisfy everyone’s pallets. You’ll only need two or three of these excellent brews before you lose your inhibitions and purchase the kit online in the middle of the night.

Miller Lite = A shallow and pedantic effort by one of the “big names” in the world, but it’s still an average beer/your national team’s kit so you can’t hate it, right?
Coors Lite = Thankfully Coors tastes and goes down like water because you’ll be drinking a lot of it to drown out the abomination that is this iteration of your team’s kit.

Bartles & Jaymes = Shennaigannery! Travashammockery! This kit is such an abomination you’d rather punish your liver, taste buds, and stomach with a wine cooler. If the kit is extra horrible, you’ll even get to whittle some wood with Pauly Shore.

Group B

Argentina Home -------------------------- Argentina Away

Adidas constantly faces a challenge with Argentina, they will always have vertical baby blue stripes, so what do they do each term to spice things up? This year apparently they give the players Designing Women style shoulder pads. The one thing I will say for this year’s kit; at least adidas didn’t shoehorn the Argentinian design into one of their godawfull templates like they’ve done in the past (this being one of the uglier renditions).

Home Design = Coors Lite
Home Uniqueness = Miller Lite
Home Purchasability = Miller Lite

The away offering this time around is a simple navy blue version of the adidas B template. The lone redeeming quality here is the simplicity of it harkens us back to Maradonna’s 60-yard run through a maze of dazed Englishmen back in 1986. And for that I have to give it some “dap” as Michael Wilbon would say.

Away Design = Miller Lite
Away Uniqueness = Coors Lite
Away Purchasability = Miller Lite

Nigeria Home ------------------------------ Nigeria Away – N/A

The image above the one that the Nigerian federation reportedly rejected (according to FootballShirtCulture), but Soccer.com is currently selling them and with a month to go, there have been no announcements of another shirt. So we’ll pass judgment on what we’ve got in front of us. Above I celebrate the simplicity of Argentina’s away kit, but here I’m more bored than I was looking at the South Africa shirts. So bored in fact that there isn’t a word on Thesaurus.com that can accurately describe my current feelings

Home Design = Bartles & Jaymes
Home Uniqueness = Bartles & Jaymes
Home Purchasability = Bartles & Jaymes

South Korea Home ----------------------------------- South Korea Away

Design-wise, this isn’t anything too special: throw some sublimations onto a plain kit and viola, you have a team/nation centric shirt. The tiger striping calling attention to one of Korea’s most prized and beautiful, and now practically extinct in the wild, animals; however, like animal print spandex from the 80’s this is a little too much of a good thing (sidebar: the Korean Tiger is the largest of the tiger subspecies in the world and was the largest living cat until some yahoos created a Liger). If the sublimation had been a little less noticeable or covering only a smaller area of the shirt, still it’s unique and bad-ass enough.

Home Design = Miller Lite
Home Uniqueness = John Smith’s Extra Smooth
Home Purchasability = Summit EPA

When I see the white away kit, I think the same things I did for their home shirt. Seeing both together makes me think that S. Korea got a raw deal and Nike simply gave them a reversible Red/White shirt. Thus, the ratings for this shirt drop a little.

Away Design = Miller Lite
Away Uniqueness = Summit Extra Pale
Away Purchasability = Miller Lite

Greece Home -------------------------------------Greece Away

Greece’s shirts are usually fairly plain and boring, I guess that’s what they get for being one of adidas’s ‘C’ teams. Here we’re seeing adidas’s C (or is it D) template that I’ve only seen on the Finish National Team and some MLS sides, but at least the MLS sides have some uniqueness to them. Being the only team at the Cup wearing this template boosts its uniqueness value slightly, but you would think with everything that the ancient Greeks gave the world they could get a sweeter kit with some nation-specific designs.

Home Design = Coors Lite
Home Uniqueness = Coors Lite
Home Purchasability = Coors Lite

The away shirt is extremely plain and is a (typical) reversal of the home shirt’s colors.

Away Design = Coors Lite
Away Uniqueness = Coors Lite
Away Purchasability = Miller Lite