Some shirts are worn. Others are remembered. The Kappa Kombat belongs to the latter.
Twenty-five years after it reshaped the silhouette of football, Kappa has revived its most iconic creation and brought back Djibril Cissé to do it justice. A design that once divided opinion has quietly become one of the sport’s great cultural artefacts. Tight, aerodynamic, unapologetic. It was the first football shirt that made performance feel personal.
When Kappa introduced the Kombat at Euro 2000 with the Italian national team, the design world took notice. Gone were the billowing fabrics of the nineties. In came something engineered, elastic and anatomical. It exposed shirt-pulling fouls, yes, but it also exposed an era ready to evolve. Suddenly, football looked faster.
For a generation of fans and players, that shirt was a uniform. The Italian curves, the compression fit, the sheen under floodlights. And for Cissé, then one of Europe’s most distinctive forwards, it became part of his identity. We’re old enough to remember it like it was just yesterday.
Reuniting him with Kappa for the Kombat XXV campaign feels poetically nostalgic and so simple. He represents everything the original shirt stood for. Individuality, energy and self-expression at a time when football was beginning to care about image as much
as impact.
The new silhouette remains familiar: sculpted, minimal, almost architectural. Yet it arrives lighter, sharper and sustainable. The craftsmanship is precise.
Across Europe and South America, eighteen Kappa-sponsored clubs will wear the anniversary edition through November: Genoa, Fiorentina, Nice, Red Star, Valladolid, Racing Club and Vasco da Gama among them. Each team will wear it in its own colours, but the design language is universal.
A single shot. A visual system expressed through multiple palettes. That consistency has always been Kappa’s secret. Their ability to make uniformity feel unique is what separates them.
Visually, the new campaign is restrained. Cissé stands centre frame, styled in monochrome. No pyrotechnics.
Adding Slam Jam into the anniversary project deepens the connection between sport and culture. Their collaboration feels natural. It builds a bridge between terraces and galleries. It reinforces what Kappa has done for decades. Build design that lives as easily in fashion archives as in football history.
Because ultimately, the Kombat was never just a shirt. A design system before we called them that. Its influence stretched far beyond performance wear into the wider conversation about how athletes express identity through what they wear.
Now, twenty-five years later, it has done it again.
In a football world obsessed with limited editions and remakes, this one stands apart for us. It is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It is legacy done with intention. Like the perfect cold brew.
The crown of football jersey design is back where it belongs. Sewn into fabric that still moves like the future.
Kappa, we’ll grab ours to go. With an extra pump of syrup.
Shot of the good stuff
