Successful designer Pavel Fuksa on creating strip for beloved club Slavia Prague
Graphic designer Pavel Fuksa has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including Nike, Lego and Google. Now Fuksa has turned his skills to a different field, designing the 2026–2027 strip collection for reigning Czech football champions Slavia Prague, the club he has followed all his life. I spoke to him ahead of the start of the new top flight season this weekend.
I know that you have a long-time passion for football strips. Where does that come from?
“Football has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Not just the matches, but the entire visual culture surrounding the game: crests, colours, strips, scarves, stadium graphics, whatever.
“It’s always been the richest design discipline in the world.
“Long before Slavia ever called, I was already designing strips as a hobby.”
You did a project some years ago, where you created football strips that were meant to be from the year 1918. What was that exactly?
“As the first FIFA World Cup took place in 1930, I pushed it backwards and designed fictional kits for countries that existed at that time, in 1918.
“I was working with their heraldry, flags and national symbols, but I put it through the lens of contemporary football design.
“That was a purely personal project, nothing ever happened in real life, but I liked how the history and identity went together with the modern design language of modern kits.
“It was later exhibited, I think, twice in Milan, although only as a series of posters – it was too expensive to actually produce these kits.”
Now you’ve done the new strips for Slavia Prague for the 2026–2027 season. What was the starting point of that whole project? I’m particularly interested in the home strip, which I guess for fans is the most important one.
“The whole project started a year and a half ago, when I got a phone call from the guys from Slavia Prague marketing.
“And concerning the home strip, for me there was something that was tangible, because together with the crest it’s probably the club’s strongest visual symbol: the stitched red and white split, the large star, with two tiny stars above it.
“It somehow became timeless so I never wanted to redesign it, or reinvent it, in a self-centred, cynical [laughs] way, or to bury it under some unnecessary design gimmicks.
“So I just focused on introducing a handful of subtle details, for example the Czech and Czechoslovak tricolour on the collar and sleeve cuffs.
“And a personal touch of mine is the GPS coordinates under the back collar, hidden inside the strip. Every player and supporter will carry a reminder of where their home is.”
That’s the GPS for the stadium?
“That’s the GPS for the centre of the pitch.”
When you did the designs, did the club immediately accept your proposals, or was there some feedback?
“I counted it today and I created over 90 different proposals. Each one of them was discussed and a decision was made on whether we were going to move forward with the proposals.
“So these three strips – a third one will be revealed sometime in September, so we only have home and away at present – are the result of numerous discussions between me, Slavia marketing and the producer, which is Castore.”
Could you also say something about the away strip?
“The away strip is a completely different story.
“I wanted the kit to express hope during difficult times. The main motif is light overcoming darkness.
“It’s about renewal and the feeling of rising again.
“It’s intentionally clean and restrained, because the defining motif, or design language, is the gradient between black and red, as if the red colour is somehow rising against the darkness, from the bottom.
“And it seems that this strip has become the supporters’ favourite. It was quite a surprise for me.
“People are praising and celebrating the home kit, but it’s rewarding to see fans embrace an unconventional colour combination and wear it from the first day with pride.
“That’s the nicest feedback a designer can get.”
You’ll be away for the beginning of the season, but how do you think it’s going to feel the first time you see your club on the pitch wearing your creation?
“I’m definitely looking forward to that moment. I’m looking forward to seeing fans, in the stadium and outside the stadium, wearing the club colours that I helped create for the upcoming season.
“I enjoyed seeing hundreds of supporters on the day of the release; it was the middle of the heatwave and people were waiting for the strips to go on sale.
“That was the moment that I realised that the project was big, was important, for different people from all around the Czech Republic.”