Hull City have spent five seasons in the Premier League in their entire history, and every one of them is attached to a shirt and a Wembley afternoon. The amber Umbro of 2008 and Dean Windass’s volley. The black and amber of 2014 and a two-goal lead against Arsenal that lasted 63 minutes. The 2016 shirt and a single goal against Sheffield Wednesday. And now the 2026 shirt, and a tap-in in the fifth minute of stoppage time that was worth £205 million. This is a tour through the Hull City shirt by the Premier League memories it carries, for a club whose top-flight history is short, dramatic and about to be extended.
The colours, briefly
Hull City have worn black and amber since their foundation in 1904, and the nickname it produced, the Tigers, has been on the crest since the 1940s. The balance between the two colours changes: some seasons the shirt is amber with black trim, some seasons black and amber stripes, and for two seasons in the early 1990s a printed tiger-stripe pattern that is still voted among the worst kits in English football and reissued every few years for exactly that reason. Amber is the constant.
2008: Windass at Wembley
For 104 years Hull City never played in the top flight, and then, on 24 May 2008, they did. The Championship play-off final against Bristol City was decided by one goal, a volley from the edge of the box by Dean Windass, a 39-year-old striker born a mile from Boothferry Park who had come back to the club for a final season. The shirt was Umbro, amber with a black collar and the Karoo sponsor, and it is the Hull design most often seen at the MKM Stadium today. Windass’s goal is played on the big screen before every home game.
2008/09 and 2009/10: the first spell
Phil Brown’s Hull started their first Premier League season with a win at Fulham and, within a month, a 2-1 victory at the Emirates, Geovanni’s free-kick and Daniel Cousin’s header beating Arsenal in one of the great results of the club’s history. Hull were third in October. The collapse that followed included Brown’s half-time team talk on the pitch at the Etihad, but the club stayed up on the final day. The second season ended in relegation, and the two seasons remain the shirts that older supporters wear most: amber, black trim, and the memory of being a Premier League club for the first time.
2013 to 2015: Bruce, the FA Cup and the name
Steve Bruce took Hull back up in 2013 and the second spell produced the club’s greatest Wembley afternoon and its most painful. In the 2014 FA Cup final Hull led Arsenal 2-0 after eight minutes, James Chester and Curtis Davies scoring, and lost 3-2 in extra time to an Aaron Ramsey goal. The shirt of that season, black and amber stripes with the tiger crest, was worn in the club’s first European tie, a Europa League qualifier the following August, and through the argument with owner Assem Allam over his attempt to rename the club Hull Tigers, which the Football Association rejected. Hull went down in 2015.
2016/17: the third promotion and the third relegation
The 2016 play-off final was won 1-0 against Sheffield Wednesday, Mohamed Diamé’s goal completing a hat-trick of single-goal Wembley wins, and the 2016/17 season saw Marco Silva’s brief spell in charge and Harry Maguire’s emergence before relegation. The kit of that season is the least worn of the Premier League shirts, for obvious reasons, and the club spent the next nine years outside the top flight, dropping to League One for one season in 2020/21.
2026: McBurnie and the richest match
Twelve months after avoiding relegation to the third tier on goal difference, Hull finished sixth in the Championship under Sergej Jakirović, beat Millwall in the play-off semi-final and returned to Wembley on 23 May 2026 for a final overshadowed by the Southampton spying affair. Middlesbrough, reinstated after Southampton’s expulsion, had most of the play. Oli McBurnie scored in the fifth minute of stoppage time, and the Hull manager and his players wept on the pitch at the end of what Jakirović called an incredible journey. McBurnie, a Scotland international, finished the season as the Championship’s second-highest scorer.
The 2026/27 shirt
The shirt Hull wear on their return is amber with black trim in the traditional balance, and at £64 it is the cheapest adult replica in the Premier League, £26 cheaper than Tottenham’s. It carries the tiger crest and, for the first time since 2017, the Premier League sleeve patch. Reviewers ranking the season’s kits placed the promoted clubs’ designs near the top, and Hull’s is a clean, unfussy return to the colours that have served the club for 122 years.
The tiger-stripe shirt of 1992
No account of Hull City shirts is complete without the one everybody laughs at. For the 1992/93 and 1993/94 seasons the club’s manufacturer, Matchwinner, printed a full tiger-stripe pattern across the amber body of the home shirt, black stripes swirling across the chest and sleeves, and the result was, depending on taste, the boldest kit in the league or the worst. It has been reissued several times since, sells to supporters of every club, and has been worn by more than one player in the years since as a training top. Hull’s current designs are restrained by comparison, which may be a reaction.
Bowen and the Championship shirts
The shirts of the nine years between Premier League spells were worn by one player who made them worth remembering. Jarrod Bowen came through the academy, scored more than fifty goals in the black and amber between 2016 and 2020, and was sold to West Ham for a fee that helped keep the club alive through the pandemic season. His 2018/19 shirt, with 22 goals in it, is the Championship-era design most often seen at the MKM.
The MKM Stadium
Hull play at a 25,000-seat bowl opened in 2002 on the site of the old Circle cricket ground, shared with the city’s rugby league club, and named for a builders’ merchant since 2021. The away end is behind the north goal, the walk from Hull Paragon station takes twenty minutes, and the ground is one of the few in the Premier League where the concourse prices have not yet caught up with the division.
What the shirts have in common
Three of Hull City’s four promotions to the top flight came through the play-offs, by a single goal, at Wembley; the exception was Bruce’s second-placed side of 2013. The club has never won a play-off final by more than 1-0. That record, three finals and three 1-0 wins, is either a sign of a club that knows how to hold on or a sign that it has been lucky three times. The 2026/27 season will suggest which. For more Premier League history, kits and match analysis, explore AQ Football.