The Bundesliga 2 home shirt vote for 2026/27 begins on Monday 10 August at 12pm CEST, and it starts as a straight knockout contest. Nine head-to-head ties go first, with the field narrowing round by round until the competition ends in a final between the two winners.
FC Schalke 04 return as the defending kit champions after beating 1. FC Nürnberg in last season’s final. Schalke are also 16th in the Bundesliga table, but that has nothing to do with this vote, which is about shirt design rather than league position.
The knockout format
Bundesliga.com said the first round of voting gets under way on Monday 10 August at 12pm CEST, with each round lasting 24 hours. The format is unchanged from last year in the sense that it is still built around direct ties, not a long league-style ballot.
That gives the competition a simple shape. Round one has nine head-to-head match-ups, round two adds three more head-to-heads and one three-way battle, and the whole thing ends with the two winners facing each other in the final. It is a neat structure for a kit contest, because it keeps the conversation moving quickly and leaves little room for drift.
The 2026/27 field includes 18 clubs: Wolfsburg, Heidenheim, St. Pauli, Hannover, Darmstadt, Kaiserslautern, Hertha Berlin, Nuremberg, Bochum, Karlsruhe, Dynamo Dresden, Holstein Kiel, Arminia Bielefeld, Magdeburg, Eintracht Braunschweig, Greuther Fürth, Osnabrück and Energie Cottbus. One of them will come out of the bracket as the new home shirt champion, and Schalke start the campaign as the side everyone else has to catch.
Written by Jack Mercer with AI-assisted research, cross-checked against 1 outlet. How we work →
