The 31 Best Sports Uniforms of the Millennium

Believe it or not, we are now 25 years into the new millennium. In hindsight, distant eras like Y2K seem very quaint, while the pandemic will probably always feel like yesterday. Sports uniforms, for their part, have undergone quite the journey over the last quarter century, as pretty much every pro franchise has taken at least one wild (and sometimes misguided) swing.

In the NBA, every team seemingly has ten jerseys now. MLB has introduced the lightning rod City Connect uniforms, with some of them proving better than the team’s main digs, and others turning heads for all the wrong reasons. The NFL remains fairly beholden to tradition, and with a few rare exceptions, most clubs have kept things fairly safe. The same is (mostly) true for the NHL, while soccer teams around the globe continue to be the leaders in innovation. As the WNBA moves away from giant front-of-jersey sponsorships that take up the entire torso, uniforms across the league have gotten much better. The NWSL isn’t quite there yet, but there’s still plenty of time to course correct.

For the purposes of this conversation, though, we’re focusing on the gems. There has been no shortage of new uniforms since the year 2000, and certainly no shortage of discourse about them either. We tried to whittle them down to the very best of the millennium, with some ground rules. Even if the team wore them into the 21st century, any jersey that was introduced pre-2000 is disqualified. The same is true for throwbacks that got revitalized, unless they got a modern twist. For example, the Seahawks’ old school joints that got dusted off for the 2023 season are a true copy and paste of the ones they wore in the ’70s. For that reason, they are ineligible. The same thing is true of the Arizona Coyotes bringing back their iconic Kachina logo, a.k.a the Peyote Coyote.

In order to make this list, the jersey has to be truly new, so something like the Mets’ black tops that debuted in the late-’90s, stayed in rotation for many years, went dormant, and then came back are not included here either. What we do have is 31 stunners, spanning the entire century thus far and covering every color of the rainbow. We know you won’t agree with all of them, or will feel adamantly that others should be included, but hopefully there’s something about all of these uniforms that you can appreciate.