West Ham United has shunned a kit supply option with Castore in order to sign a long-term contract with New Balance from the 2026-27 season, SportBusiness can reveal.
The agreement is expected to run for five seasons, with New Balance to replace Umbro as the east London club’s official technical partner.
West Ham has been kitted out by Umbro since the start of the 2015-16 season, and the current deal is due to expire at the end of the 2025-26 campaign.
West Ham’s commercial department recently went through a tender process and its decision to opt for New Balance will come as a major blow to Castore.
The UK sportswear manufacturer had hoped to add the club to its portfolio as part of its March 2024 agreement with Umbro licensee, GL Dameck, to become the exclusive ‘Umbro Professional Team Sports’ sub-licence holder in the UK, as well as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark.
Under the terms of that pact, Umbro-branded clubs continue to wear Umbro kit until each individual contracts run out after which Castore has the exclusive right “to seek to work” with those clubs. However, West Ham opted against going down that route and instead sought a new technical partner from 2026-27.
Umbro’s current Premier League portfolio comprises AFC Bournemouth, Brentford, West Ham and Ipswich Town, albeit the latter has been relegated to the EFL Championship from 2025-26.
Castore’s logo only appears on Everton’s shirt in the Premier League at the moment, after Aston Villa and Newcastle United switched to Adidas and Wolverhampton Wanderers signed with Sudu, a new UK-based brand trademarked by the club’s Chinese owners, Fosun Sports Group, ahead of the 2024-25 campaign.
Castore does also kit out Burnley, which will play Premier League football in 2025-26.
West Ham is the second European football club for which New Balance has won the kit supplier contract from Castore. Earlier this year, Bayer 04 Leverkusen confirmed it was switching brands from 2025-26, breaking the Castore contract a year early.
Castore had entered the German Bundesliga for the first time with its Leverkusen deal, which was announced in February 2022.
The impending West Ham deal marks a return to the Premier League kit supply business for New Balance following a controversial exit in 2020 which resulted in a UK High Court battle.
New Balance became Liverpool’s technical partner in 2015, but the US brand went onto sue the club after it emerged it was likely to be replaced by Nike upon the expiry of its deal with Liverpool at the end of the 2019-20 season. The brand claimed the club was refusing to honour a renewal clause that meant the pair’s agreement should be extended.
In his ruling, Justice Teare, the judge at the High Court in London, cited the status of rival brand Nike’s associated athletes and influencers, such as LeBron James, Serena Williams and Drake, as a key factor in his judgment that New Balance could not match the terms of Liverpool’s proposed deal with Nike.
Last month, Liverpool confirmed it was swapping Nike for Adidas from 2025-26, a story exclusively broken by SportBusiness in April 2024.
New Balance, Atalanta deal
New Balance this week confirmed its return to Serie A from 2025-26, with the announcement of its new kit supply deal with Atalanta.
Under the terms of the multi-year contract, reported by SportBusiness in January, New Balance will replace Joma. The Spanish sportswear manufacturer has supplied Atalanta’s kit since 2017-18 when it succeeded Nike.
While New Balance kits out mid-table Serie B side Modena, it has no current agreements in the top division – indeed it has been absent since the end of its Roma contract after the 2022-23 season.
Mirroring its legal dispute with Liverpool in the UK, New Balance took Roma to the ICC International Court of Arbitration in early 2023 after the club agreed a deal with a new supplier from 2023-24, later revealed to be Adidas.
The US-based firm insisted that it had matched a bid by the then unnamed competitor and should be awarded the renewal as per a ‘right of first refusal’ clause in its contract. However, the arbitration court rejected New Balance’s plea to stop the execution of the new technical contract “in its entirety”.