India Cricket Jersey History: Colours, Designs & World Cups

India played international cricket for more than fifty years in one outfit. Cream flannels, a shirt, a sweater in England, and a navy cap carrying the board's emblem — a design that derives from the colonial-era Order of the Star of India and has outlasted every commercial arrangement the game has since invented. That cap is still the only item of Indian cricket clothing that has never been redesigned, resold or rebranded.

Everything else has. The country that is now universally called the Men in Blue did not wear blue at all until 1985, has worn at least five distinguishable shades of it since, and has spent the last twenty-five years selling the space above the badge for sums that now exceed what the entire board earned annually in the 1980s. The jersey is the most visible commercial object in Indian sport, and its history is really two histories running in parallel: what the kit looked like, and who paid for it.

1985: light blue, and nothing else on it

India's first coloured clothing was worn at the Benson & Hedges World Championship of Cricket in Australia in early 1985 — a tournament India won under Sunil Gavaskar, beating Pakistan in the final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The shirt was light blue with yellow at the collar and through the middle.

What makes it remarkable now is what it did not have. No sponsor. No manufacturer's logo. No player names on the back. No numbers. A photograph of that side is the last image of an Indian team in coloured clothing that carried no commercial message at all, and it dates from within living memory of most people who follow the game.

The blue was not chosen for any symbolic reason anybody has documented. Australia had introduced coloured clothing to one-day cricket and the other sides followed with whatever the organisers assigned or the boards agreed. India got light blue, kept it, and eventually the association became so complete that a different colour is now newsworthy.

1992: the shirt everybody remembers

The 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand produced the most fondly regarded Indian shirt ever made, and it did so partly by accident. The kit was navy blue with a band of multi-coloured streaks across the shoulders, in the style every side wore that year, and it was the first India shirt to carry the team's name on the front and the player's name on the back.

India played badly in that tournament. They won two matches, missed the semi-finals, and the enduring images are of Sachin Tendulkar as a teenager and of the shirt itself. It has been reissued as a retro kit more than once, sells better than most current designs, and is the reference point whenever supporters complain about a new release.

The commercial era began at almost exactly the same moment. Indian shirts started carrying a sponsor's name during the 1991-92 Australian tri-series, and from 1993 ITC's Wills brand held the jersey rights, an arrangement that ran to the end of the decade and gave its name to the 1996 World Cup that India co-hosted. The story of that tournament is told in the page on India's World Cup history.

The Sahara decade

Sahara took the shirt in 2001 and held it until 2013 — the longest single sponsorship in the team's history and the one under which the modern commercial template was set. The company's name sat across the chest through the 2003 World Cup final, the 2007 T20 World Cup win, the rise of the IPL and the 2011 World Cup.

Nike became kit manufacturer from January 2006 on a five-year contract, extended twice, and stayed for roughly fourteen years. That period covers the most successful sustained run in Indian cricket history: the top of the Test rankings in 2009, the 2011 World Cup won at the Wankhede, and the 2013 Champions Trophy. Whatever else is said about kit deals, the Nike-era shirt is the one most closely associated with the side that MS Dhoni captained.

The Sahara relationship ended in 2013 amid the group's wider legal difficulties, and the rights have moved every few years since.

Who has paid for the chest

Period	Lead shirt sponsor	Kit manufacturer
1993–1999	ITC (Wills)	Various
2001–2013	Sahara	Nike from 2006
2014–2017	Star India	Nike
2017–2019	Oppo	Nike
2019–2023	Byju's	Nike to 2020, then MPL Sports
2023–2025	Dream11	Adidas from June 2023
2025–2028	Apollo Tyres	Adidas

Two things are worth reading out of that table. The first is the acceleration of turnover: one sponsor held the shirt for twelve years, and the four arrangements since have averaged under three. The second is the sectoral shift. Consumer goods gave way to a broadcaster, then to a phone maker, then to an education technology company, then to a fantasy sports platform, and now to a tyre manufacturer. The chest of an India shirt is a reasonably accurate index of which Indian industry had money to spend in a given year.

Dream11's departure in 2025 was the most abrupt. Parliament passed legislation banning real-money online gaming and its promotion, which made the arrangement untenable, and the board ended the deal at the end of August. Apollo Tyres won the replacement contract, reportedly worth around ₹579 crore and running to March 2028, having outbid other candidates. Adidas holds the manufacturing rights across all formats over the same period, having taken over from MPL Sports and debuted its first India kit at the World Test Championship final in June 2023.

The whites, which never changed

None of the above applies to Test cricket. India has worn white or cream in the longest format since 1932 and shows no sign of altering it. Sponsor logos are restricted in size and placement under ICC clothing regulations, the manufacturer's mark is small, and the cap and sweater remain close to what Gavaskar and Bishan Bedi wore.

The one genuine change was the arrival of the Test shirt with a number and a name for the World Test Championship, which put player identification on a white shirt for the first time. It caused far less argument than any coloured-kit release, which tells you something about how differently the two forms are regarded. The line of players who have worn those whites is set out in the pages on India's Test cricket history and its Test captains.

The orange problem

In 2019, at the World Cup in England, India wore an orange-dominated shirt against the hosts at Birmingham. It was the first alternate kit the side had used in a global tournament, and it existed for an unglamorous reason: ICC regulations require the away side to change when kit colours clash on television, and India's blue was judged too close to England's.

The reaction was disproportionate to the cause. The shirt was read politically by some commentators and defended as pure broadcast logistics by the board, and both readings had adherents. What is not in dispute is the precedent — India now has an alternate kit as a standing arrangement, and the argument about what colour it should be recurs roughly every kit cycle.

The World Cup shirts that mattered

Four coloured shirts carry disproportionate weight in Indian cricket memory, and only one of them belongs to a losing side.

The 1985 light blue is the origin point, worn by a team that won a global one-day tournament in Australia and then largely disappeared from the story. The 1992 navy is the design classic, worn by a team that lost. The 2011 shirt is the one associated with the World Cup won at home, and it is the last India kit that a whole generation of supporters can describe from memory without prompting.

The fourth is recent. India won the 2026 T20 World Cup at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad in March 2026, beating New Zealand by 96 runs after making 255 for 5 — the highest total in a final of the tournament, and a win that made India the first side to defend the title and the first host nation to take it. That was an Adidas shirt with Apollo Tyres on the chest, and it will be the reference kit for whoever writes the next version of this page.

Replica economics, and the counterfeit trade

The commercial logic of an India jersey is unusual because of scale. Replica sales in India run into millions of units a season, and the official price sits far above what most of the market will pay, which has produced one of the largest counterfeit sports apparel trades anywhere. Match-day crowds at Indian grounds are dressed overwhelmingly in unlicensed shirts, and the number on the back is as likely to be a favourite player's as the wearer's own.

Manufacturers have responded by pricing a tiered range — an authentic match-specification shirt, a mid-price replica and a fan version — rather than by trying to police the market, which is the sensible response to a problem of that size. The commercial ecosystem around the team, from broadcast to ticketing, is covered across the cricket in India hub, and the way supporters actually dress and behave at grounds is the subject of the page on Indian cricket fan culture.

Sources and method

Sponsorship and kit-manufacturing dates, contract lengths and reported values come from BCCI announcements, Adidas's own partnership release, ESPNcricinfo's reporting of each deal and contemporaneous coverage of the Dream11 exit and the Apollo Tyres appointment. Tournament results and scores come from ICC records and ESPNcricinfo match pages.

Design descriptions are restricted to features that are documented — the 1985 shirt's absence of sponsorship and player names, the 1992 shirt's shoulder banding and the introduction of names on the back — rather than extended into colour-by-colour accounts that photographs support but sources do not. Reported contract values are as published in the trade and sports press and are stated as reported rather than confirmed by the board. Replica market scale is described qualitatively because no reliable published figure exists for Indian counterfeit apparel volumes, and no number is invented here. Details current as of 27 August 2026.