The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Sport Saturday
Row masks real scandal here – the price of the shirt
In many ways, it was inevitable. The coloured Cross of St George on the new England shirts – a nod, apparently, to diversity – has caused a furore since the items were launched this week ahead of the Euros. Traditionalists have been up in arms, angered by the design. Politicians of all hues have piled in, fuming about the desecration of the national flag. The Prime Minister said it should not be “messed with” and Sir Keir Starmer insisted the cross needed quickly to be restored to its red and white basics.
But this is what happens when you have a commercial model based on constant change. Every couple of years, the suppliers of football shirts alter the design in the claim of modernity and immediacy. Yet, football fans are by nature resistant to change. They cling to tradition.
It means the basic colours of the shirt have to remain the same – imagine the row if Nike produced a new England home top in orange. So, the changes have to come in the detail: the flashes on the arms, the stripes down the trunk, or, in the latest design, the colour of the cross on the back of the collar. Almost every time the new shirt comes, it is such detail that is pored over, it is these micro-changes that stir up controversy.
But that is all part of the launch purpose: noise creates publicity. There may be more noise this time round, but at the shirt’s manufacturer, there will be little complaining. Because what a row of this kind does is help in the ultimate motive behind the unending churn of new football kits: the pursuit of money.
Indeed, what we should really be complaining about this week is not the colour palette used on the England flag, but the cost of the new shirt. We are in the midst of a dire cost of living crisis in which families are finding their budgets stretched beyond control. Yet, here is our national sports organisation encouraging its customers to pay £84.99 to look like Harry Kane, a price hike of £20 since the last iteration was launched only two years ago. And that is just for the basic item.
If you want the deluxe version, gifted the laughable title of the “Match Shirt”, you need to hand over a staggering £124.99. Even the junior sizes of this retail at an astronomical £119.99.
Frankly, at that sort of cost, the Football Association could help pay off a sizeable chunk of the debt for building the new Wembley with every half-dozen shirts sold.
This is where the real exploitation lies: in the relentless monetising of fealty. Not that it does us much good, complaining.
We have been moaning about the unstoppable money-grab of the football shirt industry for decades, ever since the top first became reckoned a marketable item around the time of the Premier League’s arrival. Questions were being asked in parliament about Manchester United’s constant new shirts 30 years ago.
Not that it stopped them: kit manufacturers have been coming up with new shirts for clubs and countries on an ever-spinning cycle ever since. And the new items are sold with the unspoken insistence that they are not just straddling the very apex of fashion but are a demonstration of loyalty. You cannot be a proper fan unless you have the latest shirt. At the start of the season, to be seen in last year’s shirt is a crime against fidelity.
To make the business all the more nauseating, every cynically motivated tweak is presented as revolutionary. Actually, a new shirt may be only marginally different from the last (and, in the case of Nike’s international shirts, merely a template of those worn by the players of a dozen other countries). But it is sold as something extraordinary. That pointless checked background, the publicity will claim, is inspired by the cloth-spinning heritage of the city in which a club are based. The new collar is a reflection of its industrial history. The claret-coloured trim is a nod to the chairman’s thirst for red wine. Well, maybe not that last one.
Indeed, to quote from the blurb accompanying the preposterously pricey England shirt on the Nike website, “the striped sleeve cuffs and neck tape, honour the singular style of the man who earned them their star in 1966”. It does not say who that man was. But if we are to assume it was Sir Geoff Hurst, does anyone recall his penchant for “striped sleeve cuffs”? Me neither.
And then there is the laughable pseudo-science behind the manufacture of the shirts. To make them seem like cutting edge technology, apparently the new tops are “fabric engineered” in “Dri-fit moisture wicking microfibre”. Lads, it is polyester. Ever pricier polyester at that.