If you’re at all on Roma Twitter, you might have noticed that more and more Romanisti are growing anxious about how long it’s taking for New Balance to release next season’s kits. Next season’s shirts will be the first with Roma’s new kit supplier, and practically every kit released by Nike got rave reviews, so the expectations are undoubtedly high for the new partnership.

Interestingly, there have been little to no leaks concerning what next season’s kits will look like. Just as Roma kept their signing of José Mourinho under wraps until it was truly official, it certainly seems as if The Friedkin Group is committed to maintaining a zero-leak policy surrounding the non-transfer moves the club makes. The only real rumor we have is that Roma’s four kits for next season will be red, white, blue, and yellow—not much to go on, in other words.

It’s not challenging to make an incredibly beautiful kit out of Roma’s colors; every year, the Giallorossi’s kits end up on those “Best Kits of the Season” lists that every website throws together to get a couple of extra clicks. Even so, we can glean some information from the other New Balance kits that have been leaked or released so far. If those kits are any indicator, we might be in for some beautiful shirts for Roma’s first season with The Special One.

FC Porto: The Best Case Scenario

Even beyond the beautiful away kit that’s the centerpiece of this article, New Balance’s kits for Portuguese side FC Porto are definitively the best kits that have leaked from the Boston-based brand for next season. That gold-and-blue design for the away kit is just a stunner, the muted pink of the third kit looks quite fashionable, and Porto’s typical blue-and-white-striped home kit is serviceable, even if I find it to be a bit too over-the-top.

The most important clue here is that New Balance is matching the MEO sponsor logo’s color to the color scheme of each kit. When that’s missing, I find that it really diminishes the look of a kit—I have Roma’s third kit from 2019-2020, and even though I love it, the choice to make the Qatar Airways logo be white instead of giallo is the only thing I would change about it. Let’s hope that New Balance caters to my personal interests and brings along the logo-color matching that makes these Porto kits look great.

Lille OSC: Worst Case Scenario

It might be that huge Boulanger logo plastered on the front of the kit, but these Lille kits really don’t do it for me. The use of gold on the away kit is certainly encouraging—if that’s going to be a trend for all of New Balance’s away kits, the Giallorossi might get a kit to rival the SPQR derby kit next season. That’d be special.

Beyond that, though, the watermark look on the red home kit just looks tacky to me. I wasn’t much a fan of the chainmail look on Roma’s 2018-2019 home kit, either, but at least that had some history behind it. This looks like noise for the sake of noise, and I certainly hope that the Giallorossi home kit maintains a cleaner look than what Lille has been afforded here.

Costa Rica: Eh

These two kits for the Costa Rican national team aren’t much to write home about, if you ask me. I do like the white-to-blue transition on the away kit, but that red kit looks like a carbon-copy of the Lille kit shown above—not exactly encouraging if you found Nike’s propensity towards doing different colors of the same kit for many of the clubs under its sponsorship to be just a little bit grating.

Even still, though, these kits are fine. They’re not barn-burners like Nike’s recent Nigeria kits, but they get the job done and look relatively fresh. At the very least, there’s hope that even if Roma’s kits have a similar design to these Costa Rican ones, the Roman colors will turn the kits into classics.

We’ll hopefully be hearing more news about Roma’s kits in the next few days. There are rumors that The Friedkin Group wants to officially announce the new kits at the same time as José Mourinho and Granit Xhaka (though that Xhaka announcement may have to wait a while if Switzerland goes deeper into the European Championship).

Until then, let us know in the comments what you think about New Balance’s other kits for next season! What elements of these kits would you like to see included in Roma’s kits for next fall?