How the Football Jersey Escaped the Stadium
- Aisling
- 10 hours ago
- 7 min read
My seven year old daughter owns fifteen football jerseys. She can tell you the first name of almost every player on them, though she has never watched a full ninety minutes of any of their matches. A badge on her favourite jersey is already peeling from constant wear.
I know these are not all authentic. Some jerseys came from online sellers who ship them for the price of a takeaway dinner, some came from negotiations with Lucky Lucky men on beach holidays. I have made peace with that, mostly because she will grow out of most of them before the badge peels off completely. That is the real economy behind a €20 shirt: not deception, just timing.
What stops me in my tracks is not the shirts themselves. It is what they represent. A garment built for ninety minutes of competition has become something a child chooses the way she chooses a favourite jumper. She is not a football fan in any traditional sense. She is something else, something the industry has not quite named yet, and I have spent long enough in fashion buying and brand strategy to recognise a shift like this when it lands in my own house.
The obvious take here would be to point out that clubs have finally discovered merchandise. That would be the wrong read entirely. Liverpool & Man Utd have understood the value of their fanshop for decades. Arsenal, Real Madrid, most of the traditional giants, they have long since built kids' ranges, retro drops, training wear, pyjamas. None of that is new. What has changed is where the jersey now lives. It has left the stadium. It shows up in wardrobes that have nothing to do with football, on stage at festivals, wrapped around political causes, inside mystery box subscriptions that promise a surprise shirt from a second division club in Portugal, and in my daughter's bedroom, hanging next to school shirts, as though they belong to the same category of clothing.
I think about Como 1907 a great deal when I try to make sense of this. Their president, Mirwan Suwarso, has been unusually candid about numbers most clubs keep close. Como's merchandise revenue moved from around €2.7 million to nearly €15 million, with a target of €30 million next season and €70 million the year after. The detail that matters most here? That only 38% of that revenue comes from jerseys. The rest comes from a hiking collection, a sailing collection, a running club range, items that have nothing to do with ninety minutes on a pitch and everything to do with the appeal of Lake Como itself.
That is not a football club selling replica shirts. That is a destination selling a feeling, and the football club happens to be the most visible entry point into it.
Como's relationship with adidas tells the same story from another angle. Their current deal is value in kind, product supplied with no cash sponsorship fee attached, which sounds generous until you understand what it actually means for a club whose retail sales have grown into the millions. They are reportedly not expected to renew after the 2026/27 season, choosing instead to manufacture and distribute their own kits and apparel through a new venture called RHUDE 4 FANS, built with their Chief Brand Officer Rhuigi Villaseñor. The ambition goes further than dressing their own players. They want to produce apparel for other clubs entirely.
I recognise this pattern from years of sitting across the table from manufacturers. A club locked into a standard kit deal is often required to commit to a minimum order quantity it must sell through its own shop, which is precisely why fans see three new kits a year rather than one. The manufacturer's business model depends on volume and turnover, not on whether a Serie B team (When Como were in Serie B) from a town of 85,000 people actually needs a new jersey in year two of a two-year contract. Como's president has more or less said this out loud, which is rarer than it should be. When a club starts asking whether it is being asked to sell rather than being helped to grow, something in the traditional kit economy is shifting.
None of this would matter as much to me without the other photograph I keep returning to. A village team in Greece, a kit launch shot not in a studio with dry ice and hard light, but through the everyday texture of the place itself. A man photographed proudly on his tractor in the new strip. Another asleep against a doorframe in his jersey after a long afternoon. A jersey pinned to a clothesline against a pale sky, drying next to the rest of the week's washing. An elderly man behind the counter of his small shop, the shirt worn casually over years of accumulated life, religious icons and family photographs taped to the cabinet beside him.
There is no fashion campaign polish here, no styling team, no lifestyle range attached. And yet it captures something Como's premium sailing capsule cannot quite reach on its own: the shirt as a piece of a person's actual life, not staged around it. Football jerseys used to be revealed on players, under studio lighting, presented as performance kit first and only performance kit. What both of these examples show, in very different registers, one luxury and considered, the other unposed and local, is that the jersey now gets photographed as if it belongs to a whole world rather than a single match.
It would be easy to write this as an unqualified good news story, but it is not quite that simple. Bohemians in Ireland built genuine cultural cachet years ago with their Bob Marley kit, discovered by a generation of kids playing FIFA who had never set foot in Dublin. That moment made them one of the more recognisable small clubs in the world. But talk to people close to League of Ireland football now and you hear a different note creeping in, a sense that the club has drifted further toward being a fashion label than a football team, and that something of the hardcore terrace identity has thinned out in the process. I do not think this is simple jealousy from more traditional supporters. I think it is a legitimate question every club chasing lifestyle relevance eventually has to sit with: how much can you court a new audience before your original one starts to wonder who you are actually for.
Como seems to have found one workable answer, and it is instructive precisely because it draws a hard line most clubs blur. When they collaborated with Rhude on a fourth kit, they priced it at €275, nearly three times a standard shirt, and sold roughly 2,000 units in under a week. A second run, all proceeds directed to a childhood leukaemia charity, sold close to 3,000. Meanwhile, during their years in Serie B, the club deliberately kept its standard match jersey unchanged for two seasons, so supporters were not required to buy a new one every year. The premium product and the core shirt were never allowed to compete for the same wallet, or the same meaning. One was aspiration. The other stayed obligation-free.
That distinction feels like the difference between building a lifestyle brand around a club and quietly squeezing a captive fanbase. It is the difference I look for whenever a category I know well starts attracting money it has never seen before.
Because there is money here now, more than at almost any point I can recall in this category, and it is not only coming from committed supporters. It is coming from people who liked a Japan kit purely on its lines and colour at a World Cup they otherwise had no stake in, from festival-goers wearing a Brazil shirt on stage, from a Free Palestine movement that has turned football jerseys into a form of political statement entirely separate from any club allegiance, from teenagers who know a shirt by its silhouette before they know the league it plays in. Some of that demand will always sit outside traditional fandom, and clubs are increasingly building for it deliberately rather than treating it as a fortunate accident.
I have not resolved how I feel about the other side of this, the side conversations like this tend to leave for another piece entirely: the environmental cost of a category built on three annual releases and one-off fixture shirts destined to be worn once and forgotten, the fairness of asking a family to find another fifty to one hundred euro every 9 months for a growing child, the fact that a seven-year-old's fake shirt will likely outlast her interest in it anyway, which is its own quiet argument against buying the real one. I do not think that conversation should be rushed into a sentence or two here. It deserves its own space, and I intend to give it one.
What I keep coming back to, standing in my daughter's room surrounded by fifteen jerseys and at least three names I still cannot always match to the right shirt, is the sense of belonging that football engenders & how clubs are leveraging this right now to appeal to a customer base that has never been so diverse: hardcore supports, casual fans, collectors, fashionistas, tourists and people who just like the jersey.
Football FC is entering a new league, where the badge is cultural currency and the commercial opportunity extends far beyond matchday.
WORTH A WATCH>> Honest Football Economics from Como 1907
