Rangers Drop a Fourth Kit: Umbro-Badged, Castore-Made Quarters
Rangers released a fourth kit for the 2026/27 season on Friday morning, a sky blue and black quartered shirt that carries the Umbro double diamond even though Castore remains the club's contracted supplier. It went on sale in-store and online straight away, and the reaction from supporters was split within hours. For a club whose kit saga has run for the best part of two years, a fourth shirt is less a surprise than a statement about where modern football shirts are heading.
If you collect kits for the oddities as much as the classics, this is exactly the sort of shirt that ends up being remembered — which is the whole appeal of opening a mystery football shirt and not knowing which curveball from a season like this one you'll pull out.
A fourth shirt, and what that even means now
Home, away, third, and now a fourth. A decade ago a fourth strip was almost unheard of outside the biggest European clubs; today it is a planned part of the merchandise calendar. Rangers Review reported the club billing the new shirt as a look for "the fixtures ahead" rather than tying it to a single competition, which tells you plenty about the commercial logic. A fourth kit does not need a sporting reason to exist. It needs a release window and a design that stands apart from the other three.
That is not a criticism unique to Rangers. The history of kit manufacturers is a history of finding new reasons to print a new shirt, and the fourth kit is simply the latest frontier. What makes this one interesting is less the shirt itself than the badge sitting on the chest next to the Rangers crest.
The Umbro badge on a Castore shirt
Here is the quirk collectors will fixate on. The shirt wears Umbro's double diamond, not the Castore wordmark you would expect given the club's supply contract. Rangers News reported that the Umbro branding appears courtesy of a sub-licensing arrangement under Castore, whose deal with the club has been reported to run to 2030. In other words, the brand on the shirt and the brand on the contract are not the same thing.
It gets more interesting. The Daily Record reported that Rangers are set to return to Castore-branded kit and merchandise from next season, which would make this short Umbro-branded run a closing chapter rather than a new era. A shirt that is Umbro on the outside and Castore underneath, released in the final season before the badge changes again, is the kind of detail that turns an ordinary fourth kit into a genuine collector's footnote a few years from now.
Why sub-licensed shirts become collector curios
Kit collectors love a transitional shirt. The strips that fall in the gap between one branding era and the next — a sleeve logo that only lasted a season, a manufacturer mark that changed mid-contract — are the ones that get harder to find and easier to tell a story about. This Rangers fourth kit has that quality baked in before it has even been worn in a competitive match.
Why the quartered look split the support
On the pitch Rangers are red, white and blue, so a sky blue and black quartered shirt was always going to divide opinion. Ibrox Noise, reporting on the fan response, said the reaction had not been especially positive, with supporters comparing the quarters to Wycombe Wanderers and taking aim at both the cyan tone and the border on the crest. Others, as ever, liked the boldness of it. The ribbed crew-neck collar and white detailing are clean enough; it is the colour story that does the arguing.
None of that tends to dent sales. The same outlet noted that the away kit was poorly received at launch and still sold out — a reminder that a shirt being divisive and a shirt being successful are not opposites in football retail. Divisive shirts get talked about, and talked-about shirts move. If you want proof, look at any list of the most controversial football kits: half of them are now reissued as retro favourites.
What a fourth kit means for a shirt collector
For us, a release like this is a small window on the whole modern shirt economy. More kits per season means more designs chasing attention, more one-off badges and sub-licensed oddities, and more shirts that quietly become interesting once the context around them changes. The fun of building a collection is not only chasing the obvious grails — it is ending up with the strange in-between shirts that a season like 2026/27 keeps producing. That is the thinking behind every mystery box: the shirt you did not plan to own is often the one with the best story. Rangers' Umbro-badged, Castore-made fourth kit has one of those already.