Barcelona worked out the best away shirt they'd ever make back in 2013, and they've spent every season since treating it like a mistake.
The 2013/14 away kit was simple and loud: broad vertical stripes of yellow and red, the Catalan Senyera flag worn straight across the chest. Nike made it, and it was the first time in the club's history the first team wore a shirt in the colours of the flag. The flag covered the whole shirt, bold and unmissable. Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Neymar and Puyol wore it all over Europe, and years later it still sits near the top of just about every list of the club's best second kits.
So why has every Senyera design since been a watered-down copy of it?
From 2005/06 the flag lived as a small detail on the neck of the shirt. The striped away kit was the one time the club let it take over the whole shirt. Then they backed off. The 2019/20 away kit went yellow with a thin diagonal blue-and-red stripe and the flag tucked onto the back of the neck, closer to a seventies throwback than a statement. After that the Senyera got demoted to a fourth kit, the one players wear a handful of times a season, for three straight years. Within the last twelve months the club dropped even that, handing the 2025/26 fourth kit to a tribute to the 2005 Clásico win over Real Madrid instead. That season's actual away kit went in a completely different direction, nowhere near the flag.
The usual defence is that Barça didn't win much of lasting note in the striped shirt, as if a kit gets scored on goal difference. Nobody pins a 2013/14 away shirt to their wall because of where the team finished. They keep it because it says, in the plainest visual language this club owns, exactly where the team is from. A yellow change kit can look fine and still mean nothing. The Senyera means something whether the team wins the league or loses the cup.
This is a choice, and the people making it are the club and Nike. A bold second kit is a risk. A safe yellow one sells fine and offends no one. So the strongest idea in Barcelona's entire kit archive keeps getting parked in the fourth drawer while blander designs take the away slot. The one real knock on the original is the Qatar Airways logo splashed across it, the club's first commercial shirt sponsor, a deal that had people accusing Barça of selling its soul. A faithful reissue could swap that out. The stripes underneath don't need touching.
The club has the best away-kit idea it will ever have sitting in its own history, and it keeps treating it as an occasional novelty. Put the Senyera back on the second shirt and stop apologizing for the one bold thing they got completely right.
