J.J. Watt Designs Burnley's New Away Kit for 2026–27
The cream always rises to the top. At Burnley, J.J. Watt has decided it should wear a football shirt while it does.
The former Houston Texans defensive force, now a minority investor in the Lancashire club, has thrown himself into a very different kind of project: designing Burnley’s cream-colored away kit for the 2026–27 season. Not as a celebrity add-on. As an obsessed collaborator.
Watt the Milk Man
To launch it, Burnley leaned straight into Watt’s self-styled “Milk Man” persona. On Friday, July 31, the club released a playful short film, “The Cream Rises,” that feels more like a mini-movie than a standard kit reveal.
Watt appears in flat cap and overalls as a local milk man, starting his day in the fields among cows and sheep. He climbs into a milk float and trundles through the Lancashire countryside, making deliveries not of bottles, but of Burnley’s new away shirt.
The route is a love letter to the town. Watt hands over kits to local figures such as cricket great Sir Jimmy Anderson and entrepreneur Dave Fishwick, treating them like the neighborhood legends they are. Each doorstep stop is another nod to Burnley’s sense of community.
The journey ends where all roads in this story lead: Turf Moor. There, on the pitch, Watt reveals the full Castore strip — a cream base with bold horizontal red and green stripes, a look that feels at once fresh and unmistakably old-school.
A “quintessentially Burnley” brief
This was never meant to be a vanity project. Watt made that clear.
“From day one, I didn't want this to be just another football shirt. I wanted to create something quintessentially Burnley,” he said in a statement on the club’s website. “Every decision we made started with one question: are we doing the supporters of this club proud?
“As I’ve said many times before, this club existed long before I arrived and it will exist long after I’m gone. But during this time, my goal is to help honor its great past while also shepherding it to a brighter future.”
That line tells you everything about the tone of the project. Watt hasn’t tried to stamp his NFL identity on Burnley. He’s tried to disappear into its history.
Married to former United States soccer international Kealia Ohai, Watt has spent two years working with the club on the design. He pored over old shirts, studied the iconography, and went hunting for details that would resonate with supporters who have been at Turf Moor far longer than he has.
The badge, the stone, the story
The most striking decision is on the chest. Watt pushed to bring back one of Burnley’s old crests, a detailed shield featuring symmetrical lions, roses, a bee and a knight’s helmet. Supporters of a certain age know it well; it adorned the shirt from 1979 to 1983 and again from 1987 to 2009.
Restoring it is a deliberate bridge to eras past, when Burnley fought above their weight and wore their identity like armor.
There’s more subtlety in the fabric. A faint geometric pattern runs through the cream shirt, inspired by the stonework at Gawthorpe Hall, Burnley’s historic training base. It’s the sort of detail you only notice up close, the kind of touch that says someone has walked the corridors and looked closely at the walls.
“I am merely a steward for this club,” Watt said in a behind-the-scenes video documenting the making of the kit. “But the opportunity to create a kit with this badge and this crest and hopefully with the proper respect for what it means is an incredible honor for me and I hope everybody likes it.”
“Future-retro” and fully bought in
Inside the club, they’ve seen how much this matters to him.
“It's been great fun working with JJ on this project,” said Burnley’s Chief Marketing Officer, Ed Stewart-Lockhart, who described the shirt as “future-retro.” “He's brought incredible energy all the way through. You can see how much he's enjoyed it, but also how much it matters to him that we've got it right.”
That phrase — “future-retro” — fits. The cream base, the horizontal stripes, the revived crest, the Gawthorpe-inspired pattern: it all leans on heritage while pointing at something new.
Burnley have also wrapped the launch in a collector’s touch. The first 100 fans to buy the jersey in the club’s official store will receive a special box containing an exclusive cap and a signed photo of Watt. The first 100 online customers will also receive an autographed photo, a small but savvy nod to the global interest Watt brings.
A new look for a new fight
All of this unfolds as Burnley prepare for life back in the EFL Championship after a single season in the Premier League ended in relegation. The mood around Turf Moor is one of reset and response.
On the pitch, the club must scrap its way through one of the most unforgiving divisions in world football. Off it, they are determined to show that the project remains ambitious, modern and rooted in identity rather than drifting after a setback.
The cream kit gets its first outing on Sunday, August 2, in a home friendly against Torino. A pre-season run-out, yes — but also the first glimpse of how this “future-retro” look sits under the Turf Moor floodlights.
Relegation asks harsh questions of a club’s character. Burnley’s answer, stitched into this shirt, is clear enough: the cream, they insist, will rise again.
