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Jersey Week: The five best Juventus kits of the last decade

There have been some stinkers, but we’ve also seen some glorious successes on the field over the years.

FBL-EUR-C1-MAN CITY-JUVENTUS Photo credit should read PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images

It’s Jersey Week here at SB Nation, and we at BWRAO are doing our part to show off some of Juventus’ threads. Sergio showed off our picks for worst kits of the decade on Tuesday, and today I’m here to accentuate the positive. I’ll be following the same rules he did, limiting the selection pool to the 2010-11 season and beyond.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the kits that popped the “Shut up and take my money!” GIF into our heads over the last 10 years.

Honorable mentions

I couldn’t quite put these on the list, even though I liked them a lot.

First, the 2012-13 all-black second kits. They were very simple, but when the team wore them they somehow felt powerful. Last season’s dark-grey-almost-black third kit also gets a mention, as does the 2013-14 second kit, a nice interpretation of the yellow-and-blue color scheme that ties the club to the city of Turin.

Juventus’ Arturo Erasmo Vidal Pardo outp GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP via Getty Images

5. 2011-12 away kit

Sergio, we got ourselves a throwdown.

Unlike my esteemed colleague, I adore this kit. Pink is a historic color for Juventus, and I like the shade here. To my eye, it’s a little too flat to call neon and it was pleasing to the eye, and went great with the black shorts. (You’ll find compatibility with shorts come up again in this piece.)

I also like the different sponsor. I never liked the Betclic logo, even though I do have one on the very underrated keeper’s kit of that year. But the Balocco logo just looked nicer.

I know this one was a little divisive, but I’ll die on this hill. This one always makes me smile when I see it.

Juventus v Tottenham Hotspur - UEFA Champions League Round of 16: First Leg Photo by Matteo Bottanelli/NurPhoto via Getty Images

4. 2017-18 keeper kit

With one exception (that we’ll get to), Adidas hasn’t done that well when it comes to home kits for Juve. What they have done quite well — their keeper kits. This particular one was a design that was shared with several other Adidas clubs, but I really think it’s great. The shade of blue and general simplicity made it pop on the field.

There’s a sentimental aspect to this pick, because it was Gigi Buffon’s last kit before his initial departure from the club, but it also just looked damn good. It does get dinged a little bit as a shared design, unlike another kit that we’ll see further down this list.

Manchester City v Juventus - UEFA Champions League Photo by Simon Stacpoole/Mark Leech Sports Photography/Getty Images

3. 2015-16 third kit

This was Adidas’ first season after Nike’s run, and this shirt is easily the best one that the German company has put on Juve’s back. Everything about it was sleek and elegant. The simplicity of the black-and-gold color scheme is belied by how the gold lettering and accents pop. In the right light the sponsor logo almost looks holographic. The old crest being done in the gold is also a really nice touch.

I’m also a big fan of the the font, which predates what we now know as the standard Juventus font and is, in my opinion, slightly better, especially when it comes to the numbers. Of course, if the reports from right before the shutdown about the league standardizing fonts come to pass, that question will end up being moot anyway, won’t it?

The shirt by itself is a fantastic piece of work, but this kit as a whole takes a minor knock with the shorts, which have a weird gold-to-white transition that badly disrupts the look. They also caused a few color clashes with opponents’ shorts, necessitating the pairing of the shirt with the solid black shorts that went with that season’s pink away kits. It’s a real shame, because if they’d omitted that they’d probably be the top of the list.

Juventus v Olympiacos - Uefa Champions League 2017-2018 Photo by Omar Bai/NurPhoto via Getty Images

2. 2017-18 home kit

This kit is just clean. The Henley neck is a nice touch, and the stripes are nicely balanced. It worked well with both black or white shorts, and just looked really good however you looked at it.

It’s also easily the best handling of the Jeep sponsorship logo. Since its introduction in 2012-13, the word has been encased in a large black rectangular border that tends to be just out of sync with the stripes (it’s the weakness of the ‘14-15 strip) and just drags a lot of the home kits of recent years down.

This kit makes the best use of this logo, eliminating the boxy border and letting the lettering stand on their own, with a minor outline to keep everything contained. It’s how they ought to have treated the logo all along, but unfortunately the next year’s shirt brought the border back, creating an unfortunate capital H look to the front that I’m surprised didn’t make Sergio’s list. It came back this year with the half-and-half jerseys, which is probably their one redeeming feature.

This is easily the best home kit Adidas has made for Juve, and it gets ahead of the 2015-16 black ensemble due its better fit with its shorts.

Fussball CHL 15/16 Achtelfinale: FC Bayern Muenchen - Juventus Turin Photo by Pressefoto Ulmer\ullstein bild via Getty Images

1. 2015-16 keeper kit

I freaking love this kit so much.

This kit was a nod to the 1983-84 season, when a similar getup was worn by Dino Zoff. The club won the old Cup Winners’ Cup that year, and Adidas decided to pay tribute to that era with this effort.

Sometimes the simple things are the hardest to execute, but when they’re executed well they’re spectacular. This one knocked it out of the park. It just looked so fantastic. It was a throwback to another era, with some updates that made it sleek and modern. The polo collar was deleted so as to match the crew necks on the outfield players, but that’s a plus in my book. The black and dark grey contrast really well, and it just looked superb. It’s Adidas’ best effort, and in my opinion the best kit put on a Juve player the last 10 years.