The Seattle Sounders unveiled their secondary kits for the 2025-26 seasons, “The Salish Sea Kit” is the latest entry in the Community Kit collection – a program that is a partnership between Major League Soccer and Adidas. The new look pulls from the club’s expanded color palette to utilize a mix of blues and greens within a geometric pattern inspired by textile art traditions of members of Coast Salish tribes to evoke the waters of the Salish Sea.
The base color of the kit, featured across the shirt, shorts and socks, is a deep, inky blue. The shirt’s deep blue is highlighted throughout by varying shades of lighter blues and dark green rendered in a geometric pattern inspired by two traditional Southern Coast Salish weaving techniques, twilling and twining. The result is a cascading series of triangles and chevrons running down the front that bring to mind the waves of the Salish Sea. The kit also includes aqua blue accents in the Adidas stripes across the shoulders, as well as in the swooping panels that run down the side of the shirt – a feature of the template used by the Sounders and most of MLS this season – and continues along the sides of the shorts.
The design is a product of a collaboration with a trio of local indigenous artists, with the assistance of Coast Salish artist Louie Gong of the Nooksack tribe.
“We are proud to present The Salish Sea Kit – a jersey that embodies the Sounders FC spirit and our region’s deep cultural and environmental ties,” Sounders President of Business Operations Hugh Weber said in a team statement. “Collaborating with Connie McCloud, Gail White Eagle and Danielle Morsette, artists and weavers from the Puyallup, Muckleshoot and Suquamish Tribes, has been an extraordinary honor. This kit is more than what we wear on the pitch, it is a testament to partnership, stewardship and our shared responsibility to protect the Salish Sea for generations to come.”
The Salish Sea Kit marks a return to blue for the Sounders, who last made a blue kit part of their regular rotation during the 2016 and 2017 seasons when they used the Pacific Blue kit as their alternate kit. (As a complete and total aside, they won MLS Cup in the first season of those kits.) It also reflects a continued effort to really “try some shit” with their alternate kits, as the club has seemed to make particular effort to sartorially flex on the rest of the league with their Community Kits. The Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee kits before this have each been impressive works of design, and the Salish Sea Kit is no different. This kit provides a pretty sharp contrast to the Anniversary Kit in terms of mood and tone. That’s partly a natural product of needing to have a “light” and a “dark” option in your team’s closet, but the designs go beyond simply being light and dark in color. Where the Anniversary Kit is bright and almost celebratory, befitting the name, the Salish Sea Kit is dark and almost brooding. It embodies the spirit of the sea as well as depicting its physical expressions.
The Salish Sea provides further inspiration for a couple of other details on the kit. The jersey bares a jock tag with the phrase “Water Is Sacred” in both English and Southern Lushootseed, the traditional language of the Puyallup Muckleshoot, Suquamish and neighboring Coastal Salish tribes. There is also a design on the back of the neck that contains a whale’s tail and a wave beneath a flowing “S” that is cresting over a 74. The two marks speak to the way in which the Sounders are tied to the Sound and the Salish Sea through their history, and the stewardship that comes with it.
As with the Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee kits, the Sounders will be donating proceeds up to $50,000 of the jersey’s sales to related organizations. In the case of the Salish Sea Kit, those donations will go to the Burke Museum, Potlatch Fund, Puget Soundkeeper, Seattle Aquarium and RAVE Foundation.
