Team colours, bold fits: World Cup fans bring style to the football stands

Gustavo Llanos, a superfan better known in the football world as Birdman, hypes up the Miami crowd before a World Cup match between Colombia and Portugal. Photo: The New York Times

Before the FIFA World Cup first descended on the US, in the summer of 1994, football was chiefly available to Americans in the form of posters, magazines and video games.

That year brought them football in the flesh. But the tournament had another important effect – merging the love of football with the love of fashion – passions that, at least in the US, had never been truly melded.

For a brief moment, the Americans’ “denim jersey” became as recognisable as Brazil’s canary yellow “Amarelinha” or Italy’s blue “Azzurri” uniforms.

And though the sport has yet to move fully into the country's mainstream, football style has never fallen out of favour with young fashionistas who either played on the field or at home through video games.

Thirty-two years later, the tournament has returned to American soil, bringing along with it breathtaking levels of enthusiasm in team identity.

Read more: From stadiums to street style, football fashion is currently scoring big

Over three weeks and across four cities, six matches were carefully selected to ensure representation from at least one team – and its fan base – from each of FIFA's six continental confederations.

The tour started with the US opening match against Paraguay in Inglewood, California, where the two teams shared remarkably similar tricolours that a casual observer would be hard pressed to distinguish.

The Americans particularly loved the cowboy aesthetic and overalls as brash as Fourth of July fireworks.

But fans from every country had unique style and flair to bring to the party too. – ©2026 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.