2026/27 Udinese Calcio Home Jersey Fan Version

Udinese Calcio 2026-27 Home Shirt — The Place First

Most football shirts carry a sponsor. This one carries a region.

Where this shirt comes from

Udine is a small city in the far north-east of Italy, in the region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, an hour from the Austrian and Slovenian borders and closer in temperament to Vienna than to Rome. Udinese Calcio has been the region's football club since 1896 — one hundred and thirty years, which is what this season is about — and it plays at the Stadio Friuli, a ground of around twenty-five thousand that has spent most of the last four decades in Serie A. The club's nicknames tell you as much about the place as about the team: I Bianconeri, the white-and-blacks; I Friulani, the Friulians; and Le Zebrette, the little zebras, which is what the stripes have always been thought to look like.

That matters here, because this is not a shirt that happens to be from Friuli. It is a shirt that is about Friuli, and the design will not make sense if you read it as decoration.

A flag older than most countries

Look at the upper back first. Above the shoulders there is a broad white V-shaped panel, outlined in gold, and standing inside it is a small gold eagle with its wings spread. That is the aquila patriarcale — the Patriarchal Eagle of Friuli, taken from the banner used by Bertrando di Saint Geniès, Patriarch of Aquileia between 1334 and 1350. The flag is the seventh oldest in Europe and the original is kept in the museum of Udine's cathedral. It is not a football badge and it is not a company logo. It is the emblem of a region that has been using it for nearly seven hundred years, and putting it on the upper back of a football shirt — in gold, in the place where a manufacturer usually puts its own mark — is the single most deliberate decision on this garment.

Around it, the shoulder area is striped black and white, so the eagle sits in a white field while the stripes run past it on either side. It is a quiet piece of design: from a distance you see stripes; from a few feet away you see that the yoke is shaped like a V and that something gold is living inside it.

The chevron on the chest

Over the heart, on the wearer's left, is the club badge: a circular crest formed by a laurel wreath, and inside the wreath a single bold black chevron — an upward-pointing arrow. That chevron is not a football invention. It is lifted from the civic arms of the city of Udine, where it has stood for centuries, and it has been the recurring idea in the club's emblems since the 1980s. The laurel around it is the traditional mark of achievement. The club's own colours are black, white and gold, with the gold used sparingly, and that discipline is exactly what this shirt does: black and white for everything, gold only where something is being honoured.

On the opposite side of the chest, in black, sits the maker's own mark — a small arrow-like emblem rather than a word. It is placed exactly where a crest would sit on the other side, which is the cleanest way of saying that on this shirt the two marks are a pair and neither one dominates.

What the stripes are doing this season

Udinese have worn black and white since the 1890s, and they have spent plenty of the last thirty years wearing something else — halves, hoops, curved stripes, plain white with black trim. This season the club went back to the original idea and rebuilt it properly. The stripes are printed onto the fabric by sublimation rather than knitted, which means they can be drawn exactly as wide as the designers wanted, and what they wanted is stripes of equal width: on our sample the black and the white bands measure within a couple of millimetres of each other right across the shirt.

Then the twist, which is the part that makes this a 130th-anniversary shirt rather than a plain striped one: every black stripe carries a single fine vertical gold pinstripe running its whole length. On our sample that line is only three or four pixels wide at the resolution we photographed it, which is the technical way of saying that it is a hairline. Stand back and you simply see black and white. Come close and each black stripe turns out to be edged in gold. The collar, the sleeve cuffs and the hem are finished in the same black-and-white striping as the body, and the sleeves carry a white diagonal insert across the top that breaks up the verticals — which is what stops the whole thing reading as a rugby jersey.

Everything that is written on it

This is where the shirt stops being subtle, so let us go through it. Across the middle of the chest, in gold with a dark keyline so it stays legible where it crosses both black and white stripes, are four lines of capitals that simply state the name of the region, announced as a first-person claim rather than as a place on a map. Beneath them runs a short band in the Italian tricolore. That wordmark holds the shirt's main sponsor position, and it belongs to no company at all: it is the region's own promotional body, run with the regional authority and the regional tourism board, and it has held that slot since 2023. A region buying the front of its football club's shirt is a very Friulian arrangement, and it is the clearest statement of what this kit is for.

Just under the tricolore is the second front mark, and it is also gold with a dark keyline. It belongs to a cooperative credit bank that took the position in 2024 — a bank that, in a nice coincidence, is marking its own 135th anniversary this same year, five years ahead of the club. Turn the shirt around and the lower back carries a single bright pink-magenta wordmark with a white keyline: an electricity and gas supplier that has been on the back of Udinese shirts since 2018. And low on the wearer's left sleeve, in gold with a dark edge, is the club's sleeve sponsor, which for this season sits in the betting category.

Inside the back of the collar there is a black woven label banded with fine gold stripes. The club's own description of it is that it carries the crest, the maker's logo, a line of text naming the city where the garment was designed, and one line of club history: I PRIMI BIANCONERI D'ITALIA — Italy's first black-and-whites. On our sample the label is visible inside the neck but its type is too small to read in the photograph, so we are telling you what the club says it says rather than what we can see.

What the back leaves out

The middle of the back is white and empty. Not empty by accident — it is left clear as the printing area for a name and number, which is standard practice on a match shirt and unusually generous on this one, because the striping has been pushed to the shoulders, the flanks and the lower back to keep it out of the way. If you want this shirt printed, the space is there and it is clean.

Two honest notes before you buy. The first is that this is a fan version, not club issue: the fabric, the application of the marks and the finishing are ours rather than the club's, and the finished composition is whatever the label in the garment says. The club, for its part, describes this shirt as being made with a three-dimensional knit-weave fabric that creates a subtle diagonal texture across the surface, with mesh panels at the back and under the arms, a slim fit, and 100% post-consumer recycled polyester — read the label rather than us. The second is care: wash it inside out and cold, with like colours, no softener, no bleach and no tumble dryer, and keep the iron off the crest, the tricolore band and the printed wordmarks, which sit on the surface of the fabric rather than being knitted into it.

What you are actually buying

A replica of the shirt Udinese wore in the season of their 130th anniversary: black-and-white vertical stripes of equal width, each black stripe edged in a gold hairline, a striped rib crew neck and striped cuffs and hem, the laurel-and-chevron club badge with the maker's mark opposite it, the gold Patriarchal Eagle of Friuli on a white V yoke at the back of the neck, the region's own wordmark and a second gold mark on the front with the Italian tricolore between them, a bright pink-magenta mark across the lower back, the club's sleeve sponsor on the left arm, and a clear white name-and-number panel in the middle of the back. It is an unofficial fan version.

One short-sleeve jersey, exactly as pictured. Custom name & number available.