Nike and FA reveal Socceroos kit ahead of 2026 FIFA World Cup

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As the lastest collaboration between Football Australia and Nike, the 2026 National Team collection is testament to a partnership spanning over two decades.

 

New threads, old partners

Built on the balanced principles of heritage, culture and progression, Nike have designed two kits which reflect the very DNA within Australia’s men’s national team.

“The CommBank Socceroos are set to perform on the world stage with a clear intent to compete and succeed against the world’s best, and this new kit reflects that ambition,” said Football Australia CEO, Martin Kugeler, via official press release.

“Socceroo kits become part of Australian football history, forever tied to defining moments and performances and we look forward to seeing the Socceroos represent the country with pride in this jersey on the global stage.”

Honouring the twenty-year partnership with Nike, this year’s kit draws inspiration from the iconic 2006 jersey. The hope, therefore, is that performances on the pitch will mirror this sense of pride, passion and ambition.

Innovation on the biggest stage

Furthermore, football kits represent innovation and ambition. Materials, fit and finer details must all come together in a perfect combination to allow for optimal performance.

The Socceroos collection features Nike’s Aero-FIT performance cooling technology, thus increasing airflow and ensuring players stay cool while playing in high temperatures.

But beyond the inner workings and technology of the kits, a sense of authenticity and intention continue to shine through.

“I really love the new home kit, it has a great traditional feel with the colours and the style and it feels unmistakably Australian,” outlined Nike athlete and Socceroos star, Jordan Bos.

Although kits appear as little more than a squad number and a badge, the international stage demands a jersey which represents something far greater. The World Cup is about national pride, passion and ambition, and Australia’s 2026 kit collection unites all of them.

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Football SA Extends Sammy D Foundation Partnership Into Third Year for Violence Prevention Round

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Football South Australia will run its fifth consecutive Violence Prevention Round in partnership with the Sammy D Foundation from 3 to 5 July, with junior teams again asked to wear blue armbands throughout the weekend.

The arrangement was formalised in March 2022, when Football SA and the Foundation signed a three-year agreement, funded by SA Power Networks, to deliver the Foundation’s Monkey See, Monkey Do program to more than 7,500 junior members across 52 clubs.The program is a 90-minute session delivered by Sammy D Foundation facilitators focused on changing players’ attitudes toward bullying and violence and educating parents and club members about the impacts of inappropriate sideline behaviours, built around the story of Sam Davis, the 17-year-old South Adelaide junior footballer whose death in a one-punch assault in 2008 led his parents to establish the Foundation.Football SA general manager George Georganas and Foundation chief executive Brigid Koenig confirmed the partnership at its 2022 launch, framing it as a mechanism for improving club culture from junior sidelines upward.

The round has run every season since, expanding in 2023 to incorporate the Federation Cup Final at ServiceFM Stadium,a weekend Football SA dedicated as the Sammy D Violence Prevention Round alongside the Federation Cup Final Day continuing through the 2024 season,when it was again scheduled as a designated round ahead of that year’s Federation Cup Final and shifting from an early blue tape design to the blue armbands used in 2025 and again this year.

A prevention model funded outside government

The Foundation’s programs, including its work with Football SA, are financed through corporate and philanthropic support rather than recurring government funding. Its rollout with Football SA was backed by SA Power Networks, and separate school-based programs in the state’s Far North have relied on grants from philanthropic trusts.Both the Perpetual Foundation’s Kevin Barnes Gift Fund Endowment and the Fred P Archer Charitable Trust have funded the Foundation’s work in that region.

The State Government’s response to the Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, released in December 2025, commits $674 million over ten years to a 136-recommendation reportstructured around themes spanning structural reform, workforce and community education, crisis response, and establishing a foundation for prevention, delivered by Commissioner Natasha Stott Despojaafter four women were killed in the state within a single week in November 2023. The Commission’s focus on domestic, family and sexual violence is distinct from the youth bullying and alcohol-related violence at the centre of Sammy D Foundation programs, but its response includesan expansion of abuse prevention programs to support behavioural change for people who use violence, alongside prevention and awareness activities aimed specifically at young people.

Separately, the Department for Education’s own violence prevention program, developed after a 2022 ministerial roundtable, has directed a $6 million Safe and Supportive Learning Environments Plan of Action toward schools, afterreported violent incidents in South Australian public schools rose 50 per cent in 2023, with more than 13,000 critical incidents recorded that year. The department has since reportedits first decline in secondary school critical incidents in 2024, a 4.5 per cent reduction from 2019 levels, along with a 7.3 per cent fall in suspensions and a 20.8 per cent fall in exclusions in 2025. It also noted thatviolence in primary schools has continued to rise since the pandemic, and that physical violence against teaching staff, the large majority involving primary-aged students, climbed from 273 incidents in 2021 to 662 in 2024.

Evidence from earlier rollouts

Sammy D Foundation programs delivered through junior sport have previously reported strong self-assessed outcomes. An earlier three-year rollout of a related program through SANFL Juniors, a separate competition to Football SA,reached up to 12,800 young players and their families, with 98 per cent reporting increased awareness of the impact of one-punch violence and 89 per cent reporting they avoided a violent situation because of the program.

A national evidence guide on preventing violence through sport, compiled by Our Watch, notes that69 per cent of Australian children and 87 per cent of adults took part in sport or physical activity over a twelve-month period, while also pointing toa lack of research assessing the effectiveness of such approaches, and the need for more robust evaluation of primary prevention programs within sport settings.

Clubs taking part in this year’s round have again been supplied with blue armbands for junior teams, with Football SA and the Foundation asking clubs to share images from the weekend under the round’s official hashtag.

FIFA’s ticket gamble delivered record crowds, and now a legal problem it didn’t have in September

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Soccerscene reported in September that FIFA’s new pricing system for World Cup 2026 tickets had fans and supporter groups accusing football’s governing body of being out of touch, with group-stage prices said to “start from” around 90 Australian dollars and no ceiling disclosed before the pre-sale lottery closed. Nine months on, the real numbers are in, and the fallout has moved well past fan anger into regulatory territory.

FIFA ultimately used dynamic pricing for World Cup tickets for the first time in the tournament’s history, the same demand-based model used by airlines and ride-share apps, where prices climb as inventory tightens. The cheapest tickets did open at 60 US dollars, as promised. But the top category for the July 19 final in New Jersey opened at 6,730 dollars and had climbed to nearly 11,000 dollars by the tournament’s later sales windows, according to NPR, roughly seven times the cost of the most expensive ticket at the 2022 Qatar tournament.

From backlash to investigation

What has changed since September is that the backlash now carries legal weight. The attorneys general of New York, New Jersey and Texas have opened formal investigations into FIFA’s ticketing practices, alleging the organisation held back cheaper inventory and released more expensive categories later in a way regulators say could mislead buyers. Infantino has defended the strategy publicly, comparing FIFA’s approach to standard practice across the US ticketing industry, arguing that if FIFA is at fault, then, in his words, “everyone selling tickets in North America is doing something wrong”.

Then, when the tournament began, a second controversy emerged that the September pricing story could not have anticipated. Television broadcasts from several early matches showed clearly empty sections in supposedly near-capacity stadiums. FIFA reported 44,985 fans at a Guadalajara fixture in a venue with roughly 45,664 seats, an official figure barely below capacity, even as visible pockets of empty seating spread across social media within hours. FIFA’s explanation, that attendance is based on scanned tickets and people within the stadium footprint rather than a seat-by-seat visual count, has not fully settled the dispute. Independent analysis by The Athletic found fewer than 1,600 seats unfilled across the tournament’s first six matches, a number difficult to reconcile with what viewers were seeing on screen.

None of this has dented the tournament’s underlying performance. Group-stage attendance sat at roughly 99.4 to 99.7 percent of capacity, and the World Cup has already broken the overall attendance record previously held by the 1994 US-hosted tournament. Fox averaged five million viewers across its 72 group-stage matches, a network record, while fan festivals across the three host nations drew an estimated 5.5 million people separate from ticketed attendance altogether. FIFA has projected the tournament will generate more than 11 billion US dollars in total revenue, largely from broadcast rights. The record numbers support that projection. The investigation, and the empty seats FIFA has struggled to explain, complicate it.

The correction is already underway

The clearest sign that FIFA’s pricing model responds to real demand, not just its own targets, has arrived in the past fortnight. According to ticket data reported by Newsweek, resale prices for the tournament’s remaining matches fell 39 percent in a single week as the knockout rounds opened, with the average cost of the cheapest available seat dropping from a peak of roughly 12,500 dollars in late June to just over 10,300 dollars days later. Seats for the United States’ own knockout fixture against Bosnia and Herzegovina dropped from 2,705 to 1,650 dollars over the same window.

A pricing model built to extract maximum value from peak demand will, by the same logic, correct sharply once brokers who overpaid need to move inventory. The mechanism that produced September’s backlash and July’s headlines is the same one now producing rapid discounts as the tournament enters its final weeks. Whether regulators, and the federations bidding to host the next World Cup, read that as evidence the model works, or as confirmation it needs fixing, is the question this story left unresolved in September and still has not answered.

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