Middlesbrough is celebrating their 150th year as a football club this season, with the anniversary happening on October 20th.

They’ll be looking to celebrate with a return to the Premier League in their tenth consecutive Championship season, having missed out in the play-offs last year.

Despite the sadness at the end, last season will be remembered as one of Riverside’s best. After finishing outside the top six for the previous two years under Michael Carrick, few observers expected Middlesbrough to be in the promotion race.

Borough had to deal with the challenge of losing their manager after a promising start, when Rob Edwards left for Wolves. With Kim Hellberg, they are probably in a stronger position to finish in the top two in May, and they should have done so last season as well, if not for a run of two victories in ten games to complete the season.

That carried over into the postseason, as Hellberg’s side ran out of steam in crucial stages against Southampton and Hull City, becoming the first team to lose both the play-off semi-finals and the final.

Middlesbrough, on the other hand, will try to put that disappointment behind them and go one better while donning their 150th anniversary shirts.

Middlesbrough’s 2026/27 kit reveal has not been greeted well.

An anniversary shirt generally inspires optimism and excitement for the coming year, but Middlesbrough’s uniforms to commemorate their 150th anniversary have elicited anything but that among the fanbase.

Three of the four strips contain a central crest, and while each kit, including the special one-off 150 shirt, is rooted in history and influenced by past jerseys or aspects of the club, they aren’t exactly gripping shirts.I’ve never felt so deflated during a kit reveal. In response to the shirts,

one Borough supporter wrote in the comments section on X, “Truly awful.” “Let’s celebrate a massive milestone in the club’s history with quite possibly the worst kits we’ve ever had,” he wrote.One fan compared them to cheap Sunday league kits from the 1980s. “It’s taken you this long for four awful, plain kits,” another Borough fan said.

And it’s not just Middlesbrough fans who have weighed in on the shirts; rival supporters have also flocked in the comments section to mock Kim Hellberg’s team over the new season’s kits.

One Southampton account remarked, “Spent the kit design budget on lawyers, guys?” referring to the spygate incident. Tonda Eckert’s team was removed from the play-off final and replaced by Middlesbrough after being found guilty of illegally spying on Kim Hellberg’s training session before the first leg.A Sunderland supporter observed, “Not a single one of them shouts “Borough” when you look at them, and Borough is usually one of the more recognisable kits.”

Finally, this is the most serious problem with the strips. They lack uniqueness, and the White and Yellow away and third kits are easily mistaken for Preston North End or Oxford United shirts.

Middlesbrough hopes to associate the 150th anniversary shirts with a commercial campaign.

Finally, all of the negative talk about how the shirts look will be forgotten if Middlesbrough has a successful season wearing them.

One supporter said they were “not for him, […] as long as the lads win matches wearing them, who cares?” That needs to be the approach that some dissatisfied Middlesbrough fans must embrace.

The disappointment of how last year ended has clearly bled into the offseason with the kit reveal and the sale of star academy player and last season’s Championship Player of the Year, Hayden Hackney, but all of that can be easily forgotten if Kim Hellberg’s side performs well on the field next year.

If Middlesbrough can return to the Premier League for the first time in a decade this season, there will be few complaints about the uniform they wear.