James Bird, editor of Footballco’s Mundial, is seeing brands jumping on the “football shirt hype train”. He explains why some stand no chance of working.
Football shirts are the most emotional garments in the world, with memories, mud and guts stitched into every single fiber, crest, and collar of the design. People can trace their whole lives back to what a different shirt meant to them at a specific time. An England 1998 shirt might mean the nostalgia of the first international tournament you remember, a Wolves 2010 shirt might represent your teenage years or your first girlfriend, and a Sporting Club de Mundial shirt might be in your wardrobe and remind you of when you somehow got your dream job.
Football shirts are not just garments. They are memories made tangible. We are tied to things that happened when we wore or saw them.
And that is why every brand, every band, and even political parties want a piece of this particularly booming part of the football economy. Because they mean something. And if you think you have seen a lot of brand-flavored football shirts this year, wait until the World Cup kicks off in June.
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But it really was not so long ago that people wearing football shirts out and about were sneered at. Football fans, traditionally the majority of them working class, have always been castigated, and if you were wearing a shirt casually with a pair of jeans, you definitely were not considered whatever “cool” is.
Over the past few years, wearing a football shirt has eclipsed personal memories and tribal symbology to become a cultural signifier far beyond which club you trudge through the puddles for on a Saturday afternoon. Now, for so many, a football shirt shows you are on trend. That you are scrolling through the right social channels. That your explore page is on point.
It happened a bit like this. Around 2018, football clubs and sportswear brands started to realize that streetwear was important. In the opposite way to how the Casuals subculture of the 80s was often disregarded by fashion institutions, this time, brands and clubs started to capitalize on the movement and realize they could make money from it. You had Adidas and Gosha putting astro-turf trainers on to catwalks at fashion weeks, Nike and Virgil Abloh putting Kylian Mbappe into an Off-White football shirt and a pair of Mercurial Vapors that had “KNIT” printed on them. PSG got ahead of the game, way ahead of the game, and announced Nike Air Jordan as their supplier. Since then, the fireworks have not stopped.
I think Mundial has a big part to play in this. Way back in the day we were printing fashion editorials featuring old shirts from our own wardrobes or shirts we could never afford, borrowed from the now supernova Classic Football Shirt. Mundial was not doing this because it was deemed cool at the time. We were taken the piss out of quite a lot, actually. We were doing it because it was what we had always done: heroed the clothes connected to the game we love.
But the question is: when does an object that is adored because it means something become meaningless?
Tom Armstrong, a friend, cultural analyst, and former terrace mainstay who we interviewed for our recent documentary ‘Football and Fashion: How Far Can We Go?’ spoke brilliantly about the need for connections when creating a football product, and how the right people, who understand football and everything surrounding it, need to be in the room when these decisions are being made so that the game itself and the people who pay money to be involved in it are not just pawns in an economically pretty game for big companies.
A good example of this, I hope, is the recent shirt we did in collaboration with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, an Australian guitar band who have literally created their own universe. Presented with the opportunity to work with them on a shirt for their new tour, we made sure that we understood their world and that they understood our world. So we got R.Sport, an Australian apparel designer, to work on the roots of the design, and got St. Pauli captain and Australian national team center midfielder Jackson Irvine to model it, as well as getting his partner’s studio to take the photos. This ensured that the shirt made sense. Yes, it was a product connecting music to football, but all the right ingredients were there to make sure it was authentic. And we sold 400 of them in three minutes. Damn.
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It is fun seeing the interest in football diversify, absolutely, to see heritage brands like Balenciaga or Gucci, streetwear kings like Palace or Corteiz, and clubs themselves taking on new directions and interacting with the sport is not necessarily a bad thing. It is fun to see a brand break down the normalities and codes of football and put them back together in their own way.
But what is too far?
Too far is when the fans themselves are disregarded. When all meaning is removed. When the why is just because. The shirt released by Reform a few months ago, with Farage 10 on the back, is the perfect example of a culture being co-opted just for “reach,” “engagement,” “numbers.” The only time Farage has spoken about football before, really, is to say he prefers cricket. The Reform FC shirt is just another example of Farage trying to hijack the narrative provided to the working class for his own benefit. Football stadiums have always been canvases for people and groups to share opinions about society, whether through banners, flags, or songs. Reform know this, but despite Zia Yusuf announcing that thousands were sold on the first day of retail, I am yet to see one in the wild.
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Football fans are not stupid. We can tell when there is not a why, when there is not a story, when there is not a memory made tangible.