Wales will not wear their traditional red shirts when they face Ireland in Dublin this Friday, marking the latest instance of a change implemented to aid fans with colour vision deficiency (CVD). The alteration, enforced for the first time in the Six Nations during a match at the Principality Stadium last season, sees one team obliged to switch to an alternative kit.
The shift isn’t driven by sportswear marketing, but by a World Rugby initiative rolled out with guidelines in 2021, and fully implemented as policy across all its competitions from the start of 2025. The governing body estimates that around one in 12 men and one in 200 women live with CVD, commonly known as colour blindness. The primary difficulty for those affected often lies in distinguishing between red and green, prompting the change to improve the matchday experience for a significant portion of the rugby community.
World Rugby’s guidelines extend beyond simply avoiding red and green clashes. They stipulate that, to minimize confusion, one team should wear a dark kit while the other wears a light kit. Teams traditionally wearing darker colours are advised to have a light-coloured away kit readily available, and vice versa. Kits must also be designed to ensure sufficient contrast between numbers and the background colour, and patterns should be consistent across the entire jersey, not limited to the front or back.
The guidance even extends to socks, requiring them to be distinguishable from each other and avoiding clashes with the colour of the pitch. Wales previously utilized a black change strip, but now have a white away shirt to comply with the latest regulations.
Until last season, the Six Nations operated on a system where the home side would wear the alternative strip. However, mirroring a change adopted by football leagues, the tournament now allows the host nation to remain in their traditional colours. Which means Wales, as the visiting team this week, will be required to change kits, likely wearing their predominantly white away shirts. Ireland, meanwhile, will play in their traditional green.
The change means that Ireland and Wales will alternate wearing their traditional jerseys each season, a pattern already familiar to France, Italy, and Scotland, who have been rotating kits for decades due to their predominantly blue colours.
