Marlene Daut Explains Haiti World Cup Jersey Rejected by FIFA
FIFA rejected Haiti’s haiti world cup jersey after the original 2026 World Cup design was judged too political, and the team’s official portraits now show a different shirt. Haiti will wear a plainer replacement at the tournament, replacing a kit that had already drawn heavy attention and sold out within hours.
Marlene Daut on Vertieres
The shirt that disappeared featured a scene from the Haitian Revolution: a group of men raising a tattered blue and red flag at the Battle of Vertieres on November 18, 1803. Marlene Daut, a Yale professor and Haitian history expert, called it symbolic of the revolution’s end and said there was no reliable evidence that such a flag was actually raised there.
Saeta, the Colombian manufacturer that designed the kit, used the same imagery across Haiti’s home, away and third shirts in blue, white and red. The company said the final design was meant as a tribute to the men and women who contribute every day to Haiti’s future and was not intended as a political statement.
Haiti’s First World Cup in 52 Years
Haiti unveiled the original design a few months before the 2026 World Cup, and then wore the blue home shirt and the white away shirt in pre-tournament friendlies against Peru and New Zealand. By Tuesday this week, the original kit had vanished from the official portraits and been replaced by a plainer shirt.
For Haiti, the jersey switch lands in a tournament year already loaded with history. The team is heading to its first World Cup in 52 years, and the replacement strip strips away the revolutionary imagery that made the original shirt stand out from the start.
Daut said Haiti formally declared independence on January 1, 1804, and that the country became the first slavery-free state in all of the Americas and the first nation anywhere in the world to permanently abolish slavery legally. The design dispute has now turned a sold-out shirt into something likely to draw even more interest once Haiti takes the field.
