Liverpool FC 2012/13 Home - Suarez 7 (Small)

In 2012, Liverpool walked away from adidas and handed their kits to a company that had never entered football before. Warrior Sports was a New Balance-owned American brand associated primarily with lacrosse and ice hockey, but Liverpool became the starting point for its attempt to break into the world’s biggest sport. 

The deal itself was huge: around £25 million per season, guaranteed for six years. That figure even eclipsed Manchester United’s £23.5 million-a-year agreement with Nike, making Liverpool the vehicle for one of the boldest kit deals in English football at the time. 

Warrior’s first shirt also brought back something Liverpool had not worn in this form for 25 years: the standalone Liver Bird, replacing the larger shield-style crest and deliberately reconnecting the shirt with the club’s dominant sides of earlier decades. Suárez was among the players used to introduce the new kit and the response was immediate: pre-orders doubled compared with the previous record-breaking home shirt. 

Suárez then made the first Warrior season his own, scoring 30 goals in all competitions and being voted Liverpool’s Player of the Season with 64% of the supporters’ vote. Warrior itself would disappear from football shirts only three seasons later, when parent company New Balance took over the Liverpool branding in 2015. That makes this SUAREZ 7shirt part of a very short-lived experiment: the first season of a football brand that essentially began with Liverpool and vanished almost as quickly.