After nearly three weeks and more than 1,000 medals, the Paris Olympics have awarded their final gold.

From the ambitious opening ceremony to the handoff to 2028 host Los Angeles, the Paris Games delivered numerous memorable moments. Acclaimed stars cemented their legacies and new faces became Olympic fixtures.

But some stellar performances and viral memes stood above the rest. To highlight and celebrate the best of the 2024 Games, a group of 20 staff members of The Athletic voted and compiled this list of our “Olympic Superlative” winners. (It should be noted this is not a definitive list — but a fun exercise.)

So with that, here’s who stayed winning in our eyes.

Most dominant performance

(Photo: Elsa / Getty Images)

Winner: Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (five votes)

This category was for the athlete (or team) who put together the best, most undeniable Olympic campaign.

McLaughlin-Levrone, the American hurdler and sprinter, won gold in the women’s 400-meter hurdles, setting a world record at 50.37 seconds. On Saturday, she closed her Games with another gold in the women’s 4×400 relay, pulling away from the field in her leg, which was just a tenth of a second off the world record.

Runners-up: Simone Biles and Armand “Mondo” Duplantis (three votes each)

Biles, the American gymnast, won three gymnastics golds — team, all-around and vault — and one silver (floor exercise) in her Olympic return. Duplantis, a Swedish pole vaulter, won gold in the men’s event and set a new world record at 6.25 meters to break his previous record.

Also receiving votes:

• China’s diving team (two votes) — won all eight Olympic diving gold medals
• Léon Marchand (two votes) — the French swimmer won four golds and one bronze (more on him below)
• USA Basketball (two votes) — extended its gold medal streak to five (for men) and eight (for women)
• Katie Ledecky (one vote) — the American swimmer won two golds, a silver and a bronze in women’s swimming, and set an Olympic record in the 1,500-meter freestyle
• Mijain Lopez (one vote) — the Cuban wrestler won gold in men’s wrestling, a record-fifth straight Olympic gold in the same individual event
• South Korea’s archery team (one vote) — swept all five golds in archery (men’s and women’s)

Breakout star

(Photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

Winner: Léon Marchand (eight votes)

This category was for the athlete who most ascended into popular consciousness, the one we couldn’t stop talking about, and whose celebrity dramatically increased during these Olympics.

Marchand, the 22-year-old French swimming sensation, took the Paris Games by storm. He won four gold medals in a range of events — the 200 breaststroke, the 200 butterfly, the 200 individual medley and the 400 individual medley. Oh yeah, and he set an Olympic record in each. Marchand also took a bronze in the men’s 4×100 medley. He proved during his Paris campaign why he’s drawn comparisons to swimming legend Michael Phelps.

Runner-up: Stephen Nedoroscik (five votes)

Nedoroscik is an American gymnast. More specifically, he’s a pommel horse expert who became a household name after clinching the bronze for the U.S. men’s gymnastics team, their first team medal since 2008. Nedoroscik seemed to delight Americans with his nerdiness, and he also won a bronze in the — you guessed it — pommel horse event.

Also receiving votes:

• Summer McIntosh (four votes) — the Canadian swimmer won three golds (200 butterfly, 200 IM and 400 IM) and one silver (400 free), setting Olympic records in the 200 butterfly and 200 IM
• Ilona Maher (two votes) — the American women’s rugby sevens star helped the U.S. to its first Olympic medal, a bronze, in the event
• The Woodhalls (one vote) — Tara Davis-Woodhall won long jump gold for the U.S. and was cheered on by her Paralympian husband, Hunter

Best photo

(Photo: Jerome Brouillet / AFP via Getty Images)

Winner: Image of Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina (10 votes)

This category was for the image that most resonated with our voters and best captured the spirit of the Paris Games.

Photographer Jerome Brouillet captured a viral image of Medina celebrating after the surfer earned the highest single wave score in Olympic history in a heat during the men’s competition. Medina and his board look like they’re floating above the water as Medina holds his right arm in the air while making a No. 1 sign with his hand.

Runner-up: The Biles/Chiles bow (eight votes)

Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade celebrated her floor exercise gold medal with props from American gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, who bowed to Andrade while on the podium with their medals.

(Photo: Elsa / Getty Images)

Also receiving votes:

• American sprinter Noah Lyles wins the men’s 100-meter final in a photo finish (one vote)

• Tara Davis-Woodhall celebrates winning the women’s long jump final (one vote)

Best viral moment

(Photo: Yasin Akgul / AFP via Getty)

Winner: Yusuf Dikeç shooting (six votes)

This category was for the star of the Internet Olympics — with a plethora of shareable clips and meme-worthy moments up for consideration.

Dikeç — the Turkish shooter who won silver in a relaxed fashion — came out on top. His chill stance, with his pistol pointed in one hand and his other hand in his pocket, was emulated by various athletes across the Games. “I am a natural, a natural shooter,” he told Turkish newspaper Habertürk.

The celebration that keeps on giving 👀#Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/KBX8WJBMKS

— World Athletics (@WorldAthletics) August 7, 2024

Runner-up: Pommel king (four votes)

Or, Stephen Nedoroscik whipping off his glasses and winning bronze:

Obsessed with this guy on the US men’s gymnastics team who’s only job is pommel horse, so he just sits there until he’s activated like a sleeper agent, whips off his glasses like Clark Kent and does a pommel horse routine that helps deliver the team its first medal in 16 years. pic.twitter.com/0D1ZqJjFa1

— Megan 📚 (@MegWritesBooks) July 29, 2024

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Also receiving votes:

• Appendage accident — when French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati’s crotch got in the way (three votes)
• Raygun’s breaking routine — the Australian breakdancer who confounded us all (three votes)
• Kim Yeji — the South Korean shooter who captivated the internet with her sci-fi swagger (three votes)
• Ireland’s Emily Lane and Erin King’s unbelievable catch in a rugby match against Great Britain (one vote)

Biggest upset

(Photo: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

Winner: Cole Hocker shocking the favorites in the men’s 1,500-meter to win gold (eight votes)

There’s nothing better than an underdog victory or a shock win. This category was for the athlete or team who best stunned the field and pulled off gold despite long odds.

The men’s 1,500 was expected to be a two-way battle between Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Josh Kerr, but Hocker outran Ingebrigtsen and outkicked Kerr to run off with the gold.

Runners-up: It was a three-way tie, with each receiving three votes:

Also receiving votes:

• Kristen Faulkner winning gold in the women’s cycling road race to end a 40-year American drought (two votes)
• Great Britain’s Toby Roberts’ climbing win in men’s boulder and lead final after the favorite, Japan’s Sorato Anraku, fell (one vote)

Biggest broadcast win

Winner: “GoldZone” (seven votes)

This category was for what most enhanced our at-home viewing experience.

The NBC/Peacock Olympic whip-around show, modeled after “NFL RedZone,” allowed viewers to simultaneously follow gold medal finishes across multiple events.

Runner-up: Snoop Dogg’s commentary

The rapper was a major part of NBC’s coverage of the Games, and good news for fans, it appears this might not be his last.

Also receiving votes:

• Laurie Hernandez talking gymnastics (four votes)
• Discovery Plus (one vote)
• English broadcaster Clare Balding paying an emotional tribute to Andy Murray after his final match at the Olympics (one vote)

Best venue

(Photo: Elsa / Getty Images)

Winner: Beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower (14 votes)

Iconic landmarks and picturesque views defined the 2024 Games. Our voters liked the beach volleyball setting best.

Runner-up: Surfing in Tahiti (three votes)

Also receiving votes:

• Fencing at the Grand Palais (one vote)
• Cycling road race routes around Paris (one vote)

Best final farewell

(Photo: Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images)

Winner: Simone Biles (10 votes)

It was the last or the potential last Games for many Olympic legends. Though some have not confirmed whether they’ll try to come back for Los Angeles, we voted on who among them had the best sendoff if they don’t return.

Biles is the most decorated U.S. gymnast in history and, at 27, she is the oldest all-around Olympic champion in more than 70 years. Even if she doesn’t return for L.A., which would mark her fourth Olympics, Biles is already considered the GOAT in the sport.

Runner-up: LeBron James (five votes)

Making his fourth Olympic appearance, James was named MVP of the tournament as the U.S. men’s team won its fifth straight Olympic gold. James, 39, is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer and a four-time NBA champion. Now, he’s a three-time Olympic gold medalist, too.

Also receiving votes:

• Andy Murray — British tennis player in his fifth Olympics (four votes)
• Rafael Nadal — Spanish tennis player in his fourth Olympics (one vote)

Best feel-good story

(Photo: Richard Pelham / Getty Images)

Winner: Cindy Ngamba becoming the first-ever medalist for the Olympic refugee team (eight votes)

There was no shortage of controversy during the Paris Games, including concerns about the Seine’s water quality and a media firestorm in women’s boxing, but there were many positive moments as well. We voted on what most made our hearts melt.

Ngamba, who was born in Cameroon and lives in the United Kingdom, reached the semifinal of the women’s 75-kilogram (165 pounds) competition, which earned her a bronze medal.

Runner-up: Chinese gymnast Zhou Yaqin biting her medal on the podium after noticing the Italian gymnasts doing it (five votes)

Also receiving votes:

(Photos of Léon Marchand, Simone Biles and Cindy Ngamba by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images; Tom Weller/VOIGT/GettyImages; Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

Mookie Betts — or, as he’s known around these parts, “Spooky” Betts — returned to the Dodgers’ lineup for the opener of a four-game series against the Milwaukee Brewers on Monday night, refusing to stay with the team at the supposedly haunted Pfister Hotel for the second straight season.

Whether ghosts actually exist in the historic, 131-year-old downtown hotel is open to debate, but Betts wasn’t about to take a chance that they do.

“You don’t want to mess with them,” Betts said. “I’m staying at an [apparition-free] Airbnb again. That part is not gonna change.”

Another thing that hasn’t changed: Betts’ ability to make baseballs disappear.

Playing for the first time in seven weeks, Betts deposited a two-run home run over the left-field wall in the third inning to drive in the first runs of an eventual 5-2 win over the Brewers in American Family Field.

Betts, who prepared for his return by taking live batting practice in Dodger Stadium for three days, also hit a two-out RBI single in the seventh to help push the Dodgers to their fourth straight win.

“It’s probably on one hand, it really is,” manager Dave Roberts said, when asked how many major leaguers could come back after seven weeks, not play any minor league rehab games and have the game Betts had Monday night.

“[Brewers starter] Freddy Peralta is a heck of a pitcher, so to have the night he did against him was huge. And that two-out hit off [Bryan] Hudson to add the insurance run was big. It’s a lot more fun writing his name in the lineup.”

The lineup isn’t quite whole. Third baseman Max Muncy and utility man Tommy Edman, who is expected to play mostly center field, are expected to be activated next week.

But even with the loss of Betts for almost two months, Muncy for three months and injuries that have shelved 10 starting pitchers, the Dodgers (70-49) have the best record in the National League and are tied with Cleveland and Baltimore for the best record in baseball.

“It’s remarkable,” Roberts said. “It’s a credit to those guys in the room, the coaches, and everyone playing their tails off. And I still believe we haven’t played our best baseball in quite some time. The expectation is for us to be even better.”

Shohei Ohtani, who remained in the leadoff spot while Betts moved to the two-hole, followed Kevin Kiermaier’s fifth-inning single with his NL-leading 36th homer, driving a 3-and-0 fastball from Peralta 424 feet to left-center field to give the Dodgers a 4-0 lead. It was the first time in Ohtani’s career that he homered on a 3-0 pitch.

“He has the green light [on 3-0],” Roberts said. “He can fire whenever he wants to.”

Clayton Kershaw delivered his best start in four games since his late-July return from shoulder surgery, giving up one run and three hits in 5 ⅔ innings, striking out six and walking two for his first win of the season.

“It was a good game for us, all the way around,” said Kershaw, who leaned more heavily on his slow curve. “Personally, it was OK. Decent command all the way through. A couple of big spots I was able to get out of.”

Kershaw departed with a runner aboard and two out in the sixth, only to have his replacement, Joe Kelly, give up a two-run homer to William Contreras that cut the Dodgers’ lead to 4-2. Kelly has been tagged for five earned runs and five hits — three of them homers–in 3 ⅔ innings of his last five games.

The Dodgers got one run back in the seventh when Ohtani walked with two out, stole second — his 33rd stolen base of the season–and scored on Betts’ RBI single to right field for a 5-2 lead.

Dodgers left-hander Alex Vesia struck out the side in the seventh, and right-hander Michael Kopech struck out two of four in a scoreless eighth, Jake Bauers with a 101-mph fastball and Willy Adames with a 98-mph fastball.

Kopech has given up one hit, struck out 10 and walked one in 6 ⅓ innings of six games since being acquired from the Chicago White Sox.

“He’s picked us up big-time,” Roberts said of Kopech. “In any leverage spot at the back end of the game, the strike-throwing is there, the consistent throw of the fastball, being able to mix in the slider, the cutter whenever he needs it, he’s neutral against left and right … those are the pieces I look for in the seventh, eighth and ninth inning.”

Daniel Hudson retired the side in order in the ninth for his ninth save Monday night, but would Roberts consider moving Kopech to closer?

“We’ll see,” Roberts said. “We’ve got time.”

Betts had not played since June 16, the day he suffered a left-hand fracture when he was struck by a 98-mph fastball.

He spent the first 2 ½ months at shortstop, a position he was thrust into because of Gavin Lux’s throwing woes in early March, but both Betts and the Dodgers decided last Friday that the team — and the player — would be better off with Betts in right field, the position Betts has won six Gold Glove Awards at.

Betts looked comfortable and confident in the outfield Monday night, quickly gathering Jackson Chourio’s sixth-inning line drive off the wall and firing back to second to hold the Brewers left fielder to a single.

“You know what? It just kind of happened, I didn’t even think about it,” Betts said. “Those are the intricacies of playing right field that I got to learn over 10 years. I didn’t get a chance to learn it [at shortstop] in two months.”

The Dodgers went 44-29, averaged 4.90 runs a game and hit .255 with a .770 on-base-plus-slugging percentage in their first 73 games with Betts. They went 25-20, averaged 4.98 runs a game and hit .248 with a .757 OPS in 46 games without Betts.

“Having Mookie back is awesome,” Kershaw said. “That ball off the wall in the sixth inning, to keep it to a single — stuff that not a lot of people can make look that easy–not to mention the homer and stuff. The lineup is starting to look like it should. It’s really cool.”

Unless you’re Amed Rosario and Jason Heyward. Betts’ return and position switch had a domino effect on the roster and lineup, with Rosario, a utility man, and Heyward, a right fielder, bearing the brunt of the move.

Rosario, who was batting .305 in 81 games, was designated for assignment to clear a roster spot for Betts just two weeks after he was acquired from Tampa Bay, the Dodgers choosing to keep the right-handed bats of utility man Kiké Hernández and shortstop Nick Ahmed over Rosario.

“You’re cutting ties with a really good ballplayer who is versatile, but it shows the talent we have in the room now and that’s potentially coming,” Roberts said. “I really like Amed a lot. It’s a tough decision. But with our lineup construction, I just didn’t see a lot of runway for him.”

The left-handed-hitting Heyward has started 48 games in right field, batting .204 with five homers and 24 RBIs, but with Gold Glove-caliber defender Kiermaier and Andy Pages platooning in center field and Teoscar Hernández entrenched in left field, Heyward will be reduced to a pinch-hitter with an occasional spot start.

“It’s awesome to get Mookie back in our lineup — he’s a tough guy to miss, so it will be fun to have him back,” said Heyward, a 15-year veteran. “The name of the game is helping the team win, and I’ll be ready for that.”

A new Premier League season is nearly here, which means only one thing: it’s time for footballers to stand moodily, staring straight ahead, possibly somewhere with artistic lighting and some extremely jerky camerawork, modelling their team’s new kit for the season.

A relatively new phenomenon has been clubs revealing the new kits to the players and filming their reactions, which virtually all inspire a forced grin and them saying slight variants of, “Yeah, that’s nice, that is.”

Of course, if they hated the shirts, they couldn’t say so… but we can. So here are this season’s new Premier League home kits: ranked.

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Sweet fancy Moses. You do sometimes wonder how some things happen, and whether anyone actually genuinely thinks they’re a good idea. Person A suggests an idea they sort of half-believe in, Person B doesn’t really understand it but just says yes to avoid looking stupid, so Person A is emboldened, goes to Person C and says, “Well, Person B thinks it’s a winner”, and then it all snowballs from there.

That’s one of the only explanations I can come up with for this shirt, which really does look like someone has taken a baseball bat to a lava lamp, the result of which splooged all over a perfectly nice blue shirt.

It’s the sort of jersey that would exist if there were football teams in the sci-fi action film Tron. I don’t care for it.

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Let’s address the elephant in the room here: this is not a Southampton kit. Sure, it’s got the Southampton logo, and Southampton players will wear it this season in Southampton games, but it’s not a Southampton kit. It’s a Brentford kit from around 2014, or perhaps at a push a Sunderland kit from a few years after that.

But it’s not a Southampton kit. Absolutely no way. And don’t let them fool you into thinking it is. Even if you don’t care about that… it’s just a bit dull, isn’t it?

Last season’s shirt was a glorious slice of retro Hummel, so it’s a double shame that when many more people will be watching them this time, they’ll be wearing whatever nonsense this is.

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If you Google ‘Sudu’, the top results are a duel between Wolves’ new kit providers and a Malaysian restaurant in London. Would it be too sniffy to suggest that the chefs at the Queen’s Park-based eatery could have done a better job of designing a football shirt than their namesakes?

The theory is clear: Wolves’ owner Fosun Sports Group has a stake in the newly-formed Sudu, and will thus get a bigger cut of sales, which in turn makes the shirt cheaper for fans (£58 for the replica), but that isn’t much use when ticket prices have just gone up massively.

But we do also go back to the basic fact that this shirt looks like it has been designed by someone who has never designed a football shirt before. Which, to all intents and purposes, is exactly what it is.

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It’s always a little disconcerting when a club returns to the Premier League after a long while away wearing a shirt that doesn’t actually look like the sort of shirt that club should be wearing.

With Ipswich, you want some familiarity, which means lots of white on the sleeves, if not completely white sleeves. Not this time: blue with white pinstripes and a darker blue collar. Those of us of a certain age and with a nostalgic bent would also prefer Fisons to still be their sponsor, although given they appear to have gone out of business, admittedly that is a bit of a tough ask.

It’s fine, but if you took the badge off, would you get in five guesses whose shirt this was? Possibly not.

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I’m all for consistency in design, having a common theme running through your shirts…but isn’t this basically the same shirt West Ham had last season? And for 2020-21? And 2015-16? And 2011-12?

You get the point. It feels like West Ham have a system where they go for something slightly different for a year or two, then just fall back on this ‘classic’ design, giving a nod to their shirts from the 1960s and ’70s.

Which is not to say this isn’t a nice shirt. Shorn of context, it’s lovely. A great example of how to do clean and simple. But it is a bit rum to ask people to ditch that shirt they paid £75 for a year ago — old news, no longer relevant, get with the programme, grandma — and pay £75 for a new one, when the only change you’ve made is a slightly different collar.

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Area codes are big news in football right now. Lamine Yamal was big on the 304 postal code of the town he grew up in during Euro 2024, while City appear to have based their new kit around the Manchester dialling code — 0161, displayed on the collar and cuffs.

It’s the only real detail on an otherwise entirely plain sky-blue shirt, the problem being that the pattern they’ve used makes it extremely difficult to make out the numbers.

From a distance of more than about three yards away, it looks more like a loose attempt at camouflage, but even closer up the 0 looks like a ’u’ and the 6 looks like nothing in particular. So, nice idea, but it does seem a bit pointless when you can’t actually see it.

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Bournemouth were the last of the 20 Premier League teams to release their new kit, spending the interim messing around with some odd shirt designed by their celebrity part-owner Michael B Jordan that they’d only wear in pre-season.

So the question is: was it worth the wait? To which the answer is: sort of! It’s a perfectly decent design, the stripes are strong and the red and black colour combination is always going to be pleasingly bold.

But you are always slightly suspicious when teams who don’t usually have gold on their shirts suddenly throw a bit of gold on there. Why? It all feels a bit ”the football club doth protest too much” — them trying to project the image of glamour and success, when just winning games would do that rather more effectively.

This is available to buy without the awful gambling logo on the front.

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”Extra stripes, extra style”, is how Brighton launched their new kit in July, which as a marketing strategy does feel a bit like those razor companies who just add an extra blade and call it the next great leap in shaving technology.

More stripes is good, right? Because it’s more. And more is better than less. More is good. More! It’s actually a pleasant-enough shirt, with those extra stripes placed down the middle of the existing stripes in some sort of stripe-ception attempt.

Elsewhere, it’s fairly straightforward, with a big chunky collar and big chunky cuffs, next to the slightly unusual sleeve sponsor of the Kissimmee, Florida tourist board.

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Adidas seem to have gone for a ‘less is more’ approach across the board with its kits this season, basic designs that have a nod to the company’s template from the mid-2000s.

Which is fine, I guess, but it has led to a bunch of shirts that sort of look the same: Leicester, Fulham, Manchester United and Nottingham Forest are all basically the same design with the colours changed (though there is some different detail on the latter two), which feels like a bit of a swizz.

Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect wildly different designs for each team, but it would be nice to have just a little bit of variation.

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The sales spiel for this otherwise fairly plain shirt talks of a ”subtle gradient design on the front and back”, and just in case you weren’t 100 per cent sure what that means, they’re talking about the bits where it makes whoever is wearing the shirt look like they are sweating from the navel up. Otherwise, it’s another cookie-cutter Adidas top but with that ”subtle gradient design”.

We also need to dwell on the other Adidas common design, which is the weird band things on the shorts. They basically make it look like all the players are wearing braces and they’ve let them fall off their shoulders, calling to mind the sexy and moody character in a Victorian drama who is caught in an unguarded moment with his blouson undone and a few inches of chest on display, setting hearts a-flutter.

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Back to basics for Fulham this season, after their renegade ”red stripes on one shoulder, white stripes on the other” effort last season. And while it’s very simple, it’s also quite nice, with the caveat that the red flashes up from the hips do make it look a bit like a Bolton shirt from the early 2000s.

It is a little spoiled by the sleeve sponsor, a massive logo of something called WebBeds, which, as you well know, is a B2B accommodation distribution company.

Last season, their logo was rather more unobtrusive, but this time they clearly decided not enough people could see it from the planes flying over Craven Cottage on their way to Heathrow airport a few miles down the road, so now it’s about three times the size of the club badge.

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Another from the Adidas template box, but at least this shirt does have an element of team-specific detail to it.

Forest are obviously very big on their two stars, which you can see above the club badge there, commemorating the European Cups they won in 1979 and 1980. The background design to this shirt also reflects this, and it works quite well: subtle enough not to be overpowering, obvious enough that the people who need to notice, will notice.

The whole thing is spoiled slightly by the sponsor’s logo, which at the same time as being for a betting company that is not licensed in the UK, is just a really ugly logo.

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Do you have a TV show that you really like, but at the same time you completely agree with all the criticisms of it? The West Wing, for example: it’s smug, the dialogue is nothing like how anyone has ever talked in real life, it presents itself as progressive but is fantastically patronising to women, and there’s no way Toby would have ever leaked those details about the space shuttle. And yet, I love it and occasionally watch episodes when I want something comforting.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that this Palace kit, which looks like the art project of a student who has been encouraged far beyond their talent and needs someone to tell them ‘no’ once in a while, is great.

I recognise that, objectively, it’s a mess. But if I was a Palace fan, I’d have been there outside the club shop at 9am the day it went on sale. I love it. Sue me.

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There’s something… I dunno …comforting about this Everton kit. I’m instinctively annoyed they have moved away from having their shirts designed by Hummel, which means no team will sport those glorious chevrons in the Premier League this season.

Despite moving to Castore, a brand that seems more at home making polo shirts for rugby fans, this is really quite good. I can’t really explain exactly why, other than the fact it looks like an interpretation of the kit they wore when winning the FA Cup in 1994-95.

That doesn’t appear to be deliberate, going by the blurb released with it, but as a shirt to wear during their last season at Goodison Park (if all goes to plan), this is very good indeed.

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Arsenal have played around with the colours of the three stripes on the shoulder of their shirts ever since returning to Adidas in 2019. They’ve had white on red, blue on red, gold on white and now, in the opinion of your noble kit ranker, the best combination anywhere this season with blue on white.

You need strong contrast, as a rule, and this is most certainly that, a shirt that is a tribute to one they wore in the early 1990s. It’s a little different while still being identifiably an Arsenal kit, and also features just the cannon logo (as opposed to the cannon as one element of a shield) for the first time since 1990.

Very strong, although the Emirates logo does seem weirdly massive this year.

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Listen, fair play. Adidas’s emotional return to Newcastle was always going to be catnip to those of us who fondly remember the club’s freewheelin’ 1990s and early 2000s glory days, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Here’s proof that you don’t need to do much with stripes, just ensure they’re not too thick and not too thin, and make some sort of provision on the back so the players’ names and numbers are clear enough, and you’re away.

The black sleeves mean that, of the Adidas kits of yore, this probably most resembles the 2002 shirt, sported by your Alan Shearers, Craig Bellamys and Laurent Roberts.

It’s so nice you can even briefly forget that the main sponsor Sela, with its lovely clean typeface and logo, is an arm of the Saudi Public Investment Fund.

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It’s our now annual firm congratulatory handshake to Brentford for continuing their policy of only releasing one new kit per season, a retro move presumably designed to make them stand out among the crowd of teams so perpetually happy to rinse their fans.

They will thus be sporting the same home kit as last season in 2024-25, and while that is a bit of a pity because that one is a bit rubbish, we’ll let them off on this occasion.

Well done, Brentford.

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Everyone Villa-related seems pretty happy about life these days. Even selling Moussa Diaby, who was so electrifying in the first half of last season, seems to have been greeted as the shrewd business of a sensible football club.

Everyone was in an even better mood when this kit was released, and rightly so. It’s a delightful thing, Adidas managing to pull off the feat of designing a kit for a team they never have worked with before, while at the same time not making it look weird and out of place.

The shade of blue on the sleeves is lighter than it has been in some previous seasons, which is a canny move because it makes the maroon stripes pop all the more. The pattern on the collar is also a nod, unless I’m much mistaken, to the design worn when Villa won the European Cup in 1982, which is a lovely little touch.

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You have to assume this wasn’t at the forefront of Nike’s mind when it designed this shirt, but the solid block dark blue sleeves are an interesting choice for Tottenham, given that for the last competitive game they sported this design, half the team had spent more time in the toilet than on the pitch. That was in 2006, and the match in question was the infamous ‘lasagne’ game against West Ham, when many of their squad had been struck down with food poisoning.

Calamitous gastric reminders aside, this is a really great looking shirt, clean and bold, with the sponsor’s logo in bright red actually adding something to it rather than looking awful (although it could probably do with being a font size or two smaller), while the shorts are dark blue rather than white, which is as it should be.

Yes, yes and yes. Just be careful that everything you eat is cooked through properly.

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The trouble with teams wearing their new kits for the last game of the previous season is you forget that’s actually their new kit. Genuinely went searching for a few minutes for Liverpool’s new shirt, because I just assume this wasn’t it, having already seen it in action. Which is more a comment on my declining faculties than the kit itself, which is truly excellent.

It might be slightly tricky to do but while they’re sorting out the financial rules or tweaking VAR to pretend it makes the slightest bit of difference to that dreary blight on the game, the FA or the Premier League should really put a law in place that stipulates Liverpool should always have a splash of gold/yellow on their kits.

There’s just enough here, and in addition the collar is excellent and the broken-up pinstripes thing works. Gold stars to everyone involved.

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(Photos: Getty Images/Design: Dan Goldfarb)