RB Leipzig and RB Salzburg have been outfitted in same exact kit

Red Bull’s venture into soccer is starting to pay dividends. The energy drink company’s Major League Soccer outfit has been a mainstay in the playoffs since the takeover, their Brazilian outfit has been steadily climbing the ranks of Brazil’s soccer pyramid, and now Red Bull will have two teams participating in the Champions League: Germany’s RB Leipzig and Austria’s Red Bull Salzburg.

With that being said, Red Bull’s aggressive marketing campaign and identity branding has made it so that these teams don’t have their own indistinguishable identity — they’re just soccer teams with the Red Bull logos slapped onto their gear. That was made plain and obvious when Leipzig and Salzburg released their kits for the 2017-18 season.

No, I didn’t post a picture of the same shirt twice. The first shirt is what Salzburg will be wearing this season, while the second shirt will be Leipzig’s first choice shirt for the upcoming season. The aforementioned article also states that bot teams will have identical clash kits as well.

Now, part of the blame goes to Nike for continuing to outfit their teams in lazy template clones, but at the same time, you have to figure that the clubs themselves have to have a decent amount of input when it comes to determining what their team will look like on the field. Considering that we’re talking about Red Bull here, there’s no doubt that they probably did this on purpose. I’d imagine that if Red Bull New York was sponsored by Nike, they’d look just like this for the 2018 season.

Design-wise, this is definitely a huge loss in the originality department, but if you’re a fan of soulless branding consistency from team-to-team then this is probably really working for you. What do you all think of this? Should they have shook things up with each individual team, or is this just laziness on a new level?