The Kit Hits The Fan

“There’s a perfect storm in the football world at the moment, where everybody wants the latest shirts, there are too many of them, they’re too expensive and the quality of counterfeits has improved. It’s got its own sub-culture. I can see why the environment has been created for that to flourish, but it’s not a good thing.”

Rob Warner, former Puma and Umbro kit designer

Anyone with enough time on their hands to read my other articles will know I’m a little bit of a nerd when it comes to footy kits.

So the furore last week about counterfeit ones gives me the opportunity to moan about what I think is the third most annoying thing in football.

In first place, and by some distance, is the overusing of the word ‘thrashed’ in the media – mainly BBC. For instance, they used it when Seville thrashed Barcelona 4-1 in October; it was 2-1 after 90 minutes!

Next is the  use of ’10-man’. The way it’s used now, again in the media, is so lazy it almost hurts. As in ‘Manchester City thrash – see what I did there? - 10-man Sunderland’. City were 3-0 up, and Luke O’Nien was sent off in the sixth minute of added time. But the headline implies that Sunderland played with ten for most of the game, or even, Sunday League style, turned up a man short because he’d been out on the lash the night before.

Kits are third. Not the cost although we’ll come to that. For me it’s kit choices. I’m not 100% sure who makes the decisions on these; the refs, the league or the clubs, but somebody somewhere thought that the colours worn by Wolves and Manchester City in the Premier League game (shown in the image with this article) was a better option than old gold versus light blue.

Maybe I’m showing my age, but I was brought up on a home kit being worn unless there was a clash. I’m not against a bit of variety, but this? When it makes it harder for fans to tell the players apart? Do me a favour.

And while I am a kit nerd, there are far worse / better (delete as applicable) than me. I don’t have thousands in collections in my bedroom, attic, or a rented warehouse outside Watford. But I have, over the years, acquired quite a lot and still have some pretty unusual ones.

Last week, football kits managed to unite football in that everyone was pissed off. Fans felt they were being exploited by the costs, clubs and manufacturers were annoyed that fans dared to buy fake shirts instead of being exploited, and the consumer watchdog was angry because all of this made them have to do some work for once.

Some context and for full disclosure, I’ve not been a FKW – this entered the urban dictionary in 2013 would you believe? - since the age of twelve but at that age, and for a couple of years before and after, I was every parent’s nightmare. I’d always want the latest kit; not just of my team but any team. Club, international, international clubs; you name it, I wanted it. Not to collect, obviously, but to wear. I wanted to emulate the latest stars and for me, if said kits were a little bit different to what everyone else was wearing, that was all the better.

Twenty’s Plenty

If my memory serves me, football shirts in that era would set you – or your parents - back around fifteen to twenty pounds although that also included shorts and socks. That wasn’t something you could just buy whenever you wanted it. They became ideal birthday and Christmas gifts, sometimes a family member saw one on a holiday and brought it back for me. I remember one Christmas at the end of 1982 where I had Italy’s Le Coq Sportif kit that they won that summer’s World Cup in (with Paulo Rossi’s number 20 on the back), the Spanish World Cup shirt from the same tournament that they’d hosted (my auntie had been on holiday in Alicante a few months later), the latest England away shirt and also that of Willenhall Town (long story although I did play for them a few years later, although sadly not also for England, Spain or Italy). I’d also purchased, a few weeks earlier, Celtic’s hooped top myself because it was on half-price sale in ASDA.

Current kits – the top club and international ones - cost somewhere between £75-£125, depending on the version. If you try to compare values across that timespan, it’s not actually a million miles off, although that’s comparing today’s shirt prices against the full kits that they sold in the early eighties.

But it still feels a lot more expensive. It also feels like fans are being exploited. After all, the kits in the late 70s and through the 80s stayed the same for two or three seasons. Nowadays, it’s not unusual to see a club release three – and even four versions – every year, putting incredible pressure on parents, and fans generally.

This has also inevitably created a massive rise in counterfeit shirts. A survey by The Athletic of roughly 300 Premier League fans (I think they do know there are other leagues, they just aren’t sure where) saw 52% admit to knowingly purchasing one of them, with the vast majority saying they’d do it again.

The production costs of replica shirts is around £8-10. Fake ones cost somewhere in that region to buy, and they are getting so much better, so it’s easy to see why so many are turning to them, especially given the cost of living increases since the pandemic.

In monetary terms, the fakes shirt market totals £180m per season, so a third of the market for genuine articles. The direction of travel is even more stark. The increase between 2021 and 2024 alone was over 500% and the numbers of fake shirts produced is estimated at more than 16m per year, according to analysts Corsearch.

In Chinese factories, as an example, it’s suggested that on any given day, one single factory can produce 20,000 to 50,000 shirts, and that one worker - overseeing the making of 1,000 shirts — would earn £15-£30 per day.

So fans definitely aren’t the only ones being exploited.

Cashing In

Clubs, kit manufacturers, and other interested parties warn fans against buying cheap knock offs – of course they do – and say that chemicals used in the process might be harmful. But so might dropping a hundred quid on an authentic shirt if you aren’t very well off.

So is this just clubs, sports shops and manufacturers joining everyone else in cashing in and upping prices to make shareholders more money? In the way the energy companies, Starbucks and Sainsburys seem to do?  

Historically, this form of piracy isn’t new. In the 60s and 70s, you could buy a generic kit at a sports shop and then sew a club badge onto it. Preventing this was one of the reasons that clubs began to monetize their playing kits as they did. In the 1980s, as the replica kit market – mainly aimed at kids in that era – began to boom, clubs saw the potential.

Maybe it’s just gone too far the other way. But will the genie ever go back in the bottle now?

This is revenue that clubs aren’t going to give up, even if some – Brentford spring to mind – do keep the same shirt for two years, and which seems a perfectly reasonable compromise.

But the money people don’t want compromises. They just want money.

I have said for a long time that fans are never more than the second most important thing to a club. You could expand that to other stakeholders. And the thing that ALWAYS comes before above fans, and at every club, is money.

We’re never going to go back to those days when a kit lasted two or three years and didn’t cost the earth.

But football – and Britain – was flat broke in the 1980s.

Britain feels very broken again now. By definition, most football fans are too.

Football itself – if it continues to take the money for granted, as well as taking the fans for a ride – won’t be far behind, just in a slightly different way.