Barça will ditch horizontal stripes for vertical ones in the 2016-17 season

Barcelona have still not debuted their new horizontal stripes, but Nike already know how the treble-winners will dress during the 2016-17 season. 

The American company usually prepare the design 10 to 12 months before releasing it and on this occasion, given the elections, they pressured Josep Maria Bartomeu's board for a decision in the days before their resignation. Nike didn't want the electoral process to delay their production so they submitted a design to the Barça board three weeks ago. The only doubt now is the presence of Qatar Airways. 

The big news is that the shirt will lose the horizontal stripes, returning, once again, to vertical stripes. "It won't be such a break from tradition, like in the 2015-16 season," assure sources that have had access to the designs presented by Nike. "It will be similiar to the shirts before," added another source.

Nike's idea for how to design a shirt depends on two questions: The first is if a team is not performing as they hope (as Barcelona weren't), they change things up in an aggressive manner to halt bad sales and hopefully change results, too. And the other is that Nike usually like to alternate, season on season, with classic designs and slightly different designs. 

Both of these questions were answered by Nike in releasion to the 2016-17 shirt. It's evident that the recent treble has facilitated a necessary return to a more classic design, rather than feeding the need to force a more aggressive one.