S23 WJC Uniform Ranking

The wait is finally over. After some work and travel delays, I'm finally able to sit down and properly judge all of you for the uniforms that have been created (or not created, looking at one of you).

As a refresher from past seasons, here is some of what I'm looking for in my rankings:
- I'm ranking solely off the home uniform of every team. I think/hope I have the home jersey for every team here but it's always possible that I inadvertently grabbed an alternate. If that's the case, tough luck, and feel free to link your proper jersey. I may include a couple honorable mention alternates though that won't impact any rankings.
- The whole uniform does matter. You might've created a bomb-ass jersey and then forgot to adjust the socks, that will hurt your ranking.
- Thanks to @Fascetti84 for putting together 9 of the 12 teams for me. The remaining 3 I had to grab off streams, and even some of you who sent your screenshots to Fascetti don't seem to realize that Xbox has a screenshot feature, so the quality is what it is for some of these.

With that said, let's kick off the rankings.

12: Canada

Oh, Canada? No, Canada. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the manager that tried to soil London by putting their green jerseys in the back of the closet, but I'm still disappointed. As the one team in the tournament that didn't even bother with a custom jersey, Canada is an easy last place in these rankings.




11: Sweden

As one of the teams that didn't willingly send in their creation to Fascetti, I can understand why they chose not to. It looks like a fresh club with very little unlocked, and while I understand the predicament, it's not an excuse. It's September, you can't tell me that someone on the team didn't have a CHL club that was done for the year from which you could work. Even so, the mismatching socks on the default template show me that they didn't even do the bare minimum.




10: Norway

While Norway made a pretty aesthetically pleasing jersey, I have them ranked low because they legit just ripped off the Habs. Maybe a different font and using black gloves for god knows what reason, but we all know what this looks like. I like the blue deer that looks like it just got done sticking its nose in some sort of prey, but overall this just didn't have the creativity for me to rank it higher in what's actually a pretty strong WJC uniform class.



Honorable mention to Norway on their trippy hippie alternate uniform. I have absolutely no idea what this has to do with anything, but I'm kind of digging it.




9: Ukraine

I'll give Ukraine some sock props, it looks like these would get you the Ukrainian flag on the white version of the uniform and I'm very pro-flag representation in WJC. The jersey just doesn't do it for me here, although a solid effort was made. I think it's mostly the U logo giving me some day 1 club vibes, not to mention back to back Canadiens templates we see here.




8: Germany

If you've read these in the past, you know I have high expectations for Germany with their strong colorways. These just have too much going on for me with the gradient sleeves and the heavy doses of red and yellow. Not to mention the socks looking like they were created from the old Canucks flying V jerseys. Pretty on-brand for Germany though having a serial asshole getting removed from power this tournament.





7: Switzerland

Switzerland is never super easy to work with in order to get something creative out of Team Neutrality, and I think these are perfectly adequate. The striping is a little bit busy and the black captaincy letter next to the white sleeve numbers is throwing me off, but they're not bad. Are you truly representing Switzerland if you're not neutral on everything? 7th out of 12 in the jersey rankings, 6th out of 12 in the standings. This management team is representing well.



6: Netherlands

The jerseys here are nice, but I have a firm belief when it comes to the Dutch: Abuse the orange. Just go nuts with it. So a primary blue jersey that looks more like an Islanders or Oilers minor league affiliate isn't doing it for me. Some points are lost as well on the mismatching socks.




5: Japan

I think we've found a consensus in WJC that everyone knows you need to use the Coyotes moon logo (let's just pretend it's the sun) when using Japan. Overall a solid uniform, I'm just not a huge fan of the arm gradients though. If you're a fan of the template then this could very well be a top 3 uniform in someone else's eyes.




4: USA

Team America: World Police always has a lot to work with in the creation zone. While the screaming eagle makes for a nice primary logo and the striping is nice and clean, I think I would've liked a little more Americanization here.



Oh yeah, here's the good stuff. A vibrant blue alternate filled with stars and the Ohio flag for good measure. The clean home with a wild alternate is exactly the way to do it for a good total uniform rotation.




3: Great Britain

We go from red, white, and blue to red, white, and blue. I mostly like these for the creative use of the Ottawa heritage classic template by removing the top stripe. The socks work fairly well with these as well. Overall just a nice setup. My only wish for them is to have an all-black alternate to mourn the queen like the rest of you weirdo monarch-worshipping Canadians.




2: Jamaica

Jamaica is always a fun team to see what they come up with, and every tournament I feel like we get fairly unique designs. I'm not sure if I'm on board with the black primary, I might've preferred a green base. I would also need to see these in game action to see if the green numbers on a black jersey are easy enough to see (I can't fully see in this potato quality how thick of a yellow outline there is). But that sock and sleeve cohesion, my goodness, that's what I want to see. The tiki logo is a fun crest and I think these were very well put-together as a whole. None of my gripes are even real gripes, more that I'd be curious to see the alternate options.




1: Poland

At the top of the rankings we find a team that rocks a 2 color flag that doesn't have a lot to work with. What did I say about flag representation on WJC jerseys though? I love it. And what do we have here? The Polish flag right in the middle of this jersey. I'm willing to call the country pOland if that gives us reason to accept the big gold O in the middle. Or maybe it represents how many games Poland actually played on Tuesday with a big 3 forfeit night. The management should be proud of this uniform, because they sure as shit shouldn't be proud of their team.




And there are your S23 rankings. I'll be honest, this was one of the harder rankings to put together. We only had 2 teams completely mail it in and I don't think anyone truly blew everyone else out of the water, so if someone else has completely different rankings inside the top 10 I really can't argue with it. Thanks for reading, hopefully you all enjoy reading this half as much as I enjoy putting it together every season.