We Tried To Design A Kotaku Esports Jersey With Champion

If you’re old and decrepit like me, you might remember when Sega was a sponsor of four European soccer teams back when the Dreamcast was launched. The clubs included Saint-Étienne, Sampdoria, Deportivo de La Coruña and, most notably, Arsenal F.C., so the jerseys of each team featured a massive logo for the short-lived console, front and centre.

While there have been other gaming-sponsored jerseys, that partnership is the one that sticks in my mind the most. I bring this up because it's something I think about whenever I see traditional sports brands doing esports-focused gear. Champion, an athletic wear brand that has been dabbling in gaming collabs since 2019, is now offering a feature where you can create custom esports jerseys. Oh, how far we’ve come.

Personally, I’m always a fan of being able to muck around under the guise of "doing work", so I took a crack at Champion's service, hoping to answer an age-old question: what would a Kotaku Australia esports jersey look like?

Champion offers six base esports jersey designs to pick from, which you can start customising almost right away. You can add your team's name and upload any logos you might have. You can also make more personal customisation like jersey numbers and gamer tags. The webstore also lets you create shareable links for your designs, so you can pass them around with your team.

A single jersey will set you back $99.95, which is a bit pricey if you’re just buying one for yourself. However, the individual jersey price will decrease with the more you buy, because there's no "I" in "esports team". According to Champion, it’ll ship out the jersey within 25 business days. If you buy one now it might arrive just in time for your team to get into an Overwatch 2 match.

Keeping with Kotaku Australia's main colour scheme (pink, black and white), here's what I came up with for an esports jersey design:

It's a pretty basic jersey, but I’m personally more into cleaner designs.

Apart from esports, Championship is also offering customisable jerseys and shorts for both soccer and basketball. Honestly, there's nothing stopping you from using those kits as the base design for your esports team. So here's one I made using one of the soccer kits as a base.

At the end of the day, Kotaku Australia is a team and no creative challenge would be complete without our resident artist, Ruby. I asked her to try her hand at a few jersey designs.

I assume these are all going to be Very Normal and Not Weird At All. So let's see what she came up with.

Ah yes, a jersey featuring Kotaku Australia's iconic mascot, Goop Boy. A fairly basic kit in terms of colour and design, but considering the size of Goop Boy, anything else would make the jersey a bit too busy.

What's next?

This jersey is a bit more gaming-focused as it features the cum-filled arcade cabinet from Ruby's illustrated guide to the worst gaming deals. Without that context, what's leaking out of that cabinet isn't obvious, so it's a good conversation starter.

Nice crisp colours and some fun patterning. Very cool, very normal. Just a quick, totally unrelated question though, but do you think God stays in heaven because He, too, lives in fear of what He's created here on earth?

It's cool to see brands opening up to competitive gaming like this. By offering the same feature for esports, soccer and basketball, Champion is putting these three sports on the same level of importance. If you feel like making your own custom Champion eSports jersey – with or without Meat Man – you can do that here.

Chris Neill is an E-Commerce Editor at Pedestrian Group, working across PEDESTRIAN.TV, VICE Australia, Refinery29 Australia, Gizmodo Australia, Lifehacker Australia and Kotaku Australia. He primarily writes about videogames, comics and other nerdy topics, along with consumer and lifestyle tech.He firmly believes that pop culture peaked with Prince's 'Batdance'. You can find him on Twitter at @garflyf or you can contact him via email.

Noice, can't possibly have a Kotaku AU jersey without some Ruby on there.

Sexy peanut for the win.