As PUMA hands its World Cup travel wear and goalkeeper kits to Salehe Bembury, football gets something it has been missing: a little productive disruption.
Truth is, football has never been short on heritage. If anything, it can be weighed down by it. The crests, the colours, the old photographs, the sacred silhouettes. It’s a sport kinda obsessed with memory, which is part of its appeal, but also part of its problem.
Salehe Bembury’s arrival into PUMA’s international football universe, though, feels interesting because he does not appear overawed by any of that. Sure, he respects the archive, clearly, but he doesn’t tiptoe around it – which is exactly why football needs Bembury, who is also currently Versace’s head honcho of footwear.
The new PUMA x SALEHE BEMBURY TRVL WEAR collection arrives as the brand’s second major football chapter of the summer, following the launch of its 11 national federation kits in March.
This time, though, the focus shifts away from the conventional match-day strip and into the surrounding theatre of tournament football: the journey, the tunnel, the hotel, the moments between matches, the visual identity a team carries before it ever reaches the pitch.
Designed for PUMA’s 11 qualified national federations – Portugal, Morocco, Ghana, Paraguay, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Czech Republic, Switzerland, New Zealand, Austria and Egypt – the collection spans travel wear and goalkeeper kits, each shaped through Bembury’s recognisable design language.
Football has spent years borrowing from streetwear, fashion and lifestyle culture, but often in the safest possible ways. A tasteful off-pitch capsule or a blacked-out tracksuit, for instance. Bembury’s approach feels different because it isn’t dressing football in fashion’s clothes, it’s asking what football might look like if it loosened up a little.
International football is not just about performance, it’s about projection. Teams arrive at tournaments carrying a country’s colours, politics, climate, landscape, history and mood. In recent years, that has too often been flattened into template design. A federation badge here and a tonal pattern there.
Bembury’s work appears to push against that sameness by giving each nation its own visual code, informed by geography, biology, architecture and cultural legacy.
The goalkeeper kits are where that thinking feels loudest. Historically, the goalkeeper shirt has always been football’s permission slip for weirdness. It is the one space on the pitch where excess is expected.
Bembury stepping into that lineage makes sense. His work has always lived between disruption and wearability, between the strange and the instantly desirable.
The travel wear is arguably the smarter move, though. By reworking the iconic PUMA KING tracksuit alongside jerseys, tees and shorts, Bembury is playing with the part of football style that has become most culturally powerful: the bits worn away from the grass.
“This collection is about honouring the legacy of the KING franchise while expanding its world,” said Bembury of the capsule. “With TRVL WEAR, we pull from the natural identities of each federation and translate them into something that lives both on the pitch and beyond it. It’s a system that moves seamlessly between performance and everyday life.”
After all, football doesn’t need another fashion collaboration that looks good in a lookbook and disappears a week later, it needs designers, like Bembury, who understand systems: how players move, how fans dress, how identity travels, how a national team can look like itself without becoming trapped by its own past.
With a third PUMA football chapter still to come, including new boot innovations and a fresh ULTRA 7, this Salehe Bembury collection lands as something bigger than a pre-tournament wardrobe. It suggests a different way of thinking about the game’s aesthetics that’s both less rigid and less reverent.
Of course, football will always need tradition. But tradition only stays interesting when someone is willing to disturb it – and Salehe Bembury isn’t here to make football look neat because, well, it’s looked neat for long enough.
