The Barcelona third kit is finally coming out of its wrapping. Hansi Flick’s side trained on Friday in the turquoise-tinged gear from the collection, and the shirt itself is set for its competitive debut on Sunday afternoon away at Levante — more than a month after it was unveiled, and after a pre-season in which it never once made it onto the pitch.
Barcelona third kit set for its Levante debut
The game at the Ciutat de València kicks off at 16:15 CEST (15:15 BST) on Sunday, an early slot in what is likely to be serious heat again. The switch is not a marketing whim: Levante play in blue and claret, close enough to Barcelona’s own garnet and blue that the away shirt does not solve the clash either. The third strip is the obvious answer, which is why kit-tracking account Memorabilia1899 flagged the fixture days ago before Mundo Deportivo reported the squad training in the matching turquoise kit on Friday, with Rodri and Hamza Abdelkarim among those pictured in it.
A 1990s throwback in frost green and cactus dust
The design leans hard on nostalgia. Launched on 12 August with Fermín López fronting the club’s campaign, it pairs two shades the club calls frost green and cactus dust, split down the front by a zigzag line with the Spotify logo sitting in the middle of it. The collar is finished in deep blue. Anyone who watched the Blaugrana in the mid-1990s will recognise the reference point immediately: Kappa’s 1996/97 away shirt, the one Ronaldo wore through his single, ludicrous season in Catalonia.
That palette has more history at the club than the “third kit” label suggests. Turquoise first appeared on a Barça shirt in 1985/86, designed by Meyba, and by Barca Universal’s count it has been used across 21 seasons in 11 different designs, taking in Meyba, Kappa and Nike along the way. For a club whose alternate strips have swung from black to gold to neon in recent years, this is one of the safer bets in the wardrobe.
A shirt debuting with the team flying
It arrives at a convenient moment. Barcelona have won all five of their matches this season and scored 22 goals doing it, a rate the club had not managed since 1950, with Raphinha and Lamine Yamal both in the sort of form that makes a Sunday afternoon away from home feel like an event. Luis Castro’s Levante are unlikely to relish the fixture.
Flick, for his part, has shown no appetite for treating any of this as routine. Friday’s was the squad’s first session of the week aimed at Levante, and he had everyone available: Eric García trained in the protective mask he has had to dig out again after a deviated septum suffered in an accidental collision with Rodri at Mestalla, while Jesse Bisiwu worked with the group and, with his paperwork now in order, is available for selection. Whether Flick uses the trip to Valencia to freshen things up before the schedule thickens is one of the few genuine questions hanging over the weekend.
Either way, the shirt gets its night — or rather its scorching afternoon. The last time Barcelona wore turquoise with this much attention on them, the man in it scored 47 goals in a season and left for Inter. The bar, then, is set somewhat high.
