When we were kids not many of us wore replica football shirts of our favourite teams. If we were lucky enough to get one it lasted us a few years. They were not that much more costly than a normal football shirt.  People did not go to the matches wearing them like they do today.  We would wear then to play football. It was before the days everyone wore trainers, tracksuit bottoms and hoodies. People had scarves and hats of course – it was colder then!  We even had wooden rattles that made a racket. Certainly there were no sponsors advertising betting companies or Middle East airlines. No names on the back either.  Shirts stayed the same and there was no such thing as a different away shirt.

This Christmas many parents will be looking to buy a shirt for their children.

Today’s replica shirts are big business and an important commodity in corporate capital’s transformation of football into an important sector of the world capitalist economic system. In fact you see Premier League team shirts on TV worn by people across the globe, including in war zones. It is a huge corporate business dominated by brands like Nike, Umbro, Addidas and Puma.

Global capital has taken over football

The shirts express the way late capitalism has integrated and globalised what was a less professionalised sport once owned and run by local businessmen. Subscription TV and the related advertising/sponsorship revenue mean top players can earn up to a million pounds a month and clubs can be very profitable. A club like Manchester United generates more revenue from TV rights and merchandise sold worldwide than it takes through the turnstiles.  Forty or fifty years ago the clubs did not even issue shares.

The global football shirt business is a multi-billion dollar industry, with estimates for the overall market (including replicas) ranging between $100bn to $150bn per year.  It is projected to grow. 30% of the market is in the Asia-Pacific region; a long way from the traditional centres of the game.  No wonder the world governing body, FIFA, has expanded the number of teams competing in next year’s World Cup to 48! (a 16 team jump from last time). The growth of Women’s professional football is another driver of the market.

For parents buying their kids a football shirt this Xmas they will have to pay £85 for the official Manchester United shirt.  If you have to buy for a couple of kids and then fork out next year because the shirt has changed then this makes quite a dent in the household budget.  Just like for all commodities, the capitalists are not interested in making a quality shirt that will last for a number of years. They want you to buy a new shirt every year or so. New designs and new sponsors mean the shirt changes and people are pressured to buy the new version.

Counterfeit shirts

So what do hard pressed parents do? They look to buy the unofficial versions which are freely available. The Man Utd shirt price goes down as low as £!5.  The Premier League has revealed its anti-counterfeiting programme helped seize 1.1 million items – worth more than £70m – for the period covering the 2020-21 to 2024-25 seasons. That is a lot of counterfeit shirts. 

Just the other day the BBC ran a Breakfast News report on the ‘scandal’ of counterfeit shirt sales.

Now it is true that there are health concerns about how harmful toxins or dyes used to manufacture these shirts can make them itchy or bring you out in a rash. Official replicas have to follow certain statutory regulations for producing clothes. Probably the quality of the textiles used is better. 

The BBC report did not provide detailed figures of whether this is a real health problem – how many actual cases are recorded.  Purchase of such counterfeit goods is widespread but there does not seem to be an equivalent epidemic of health problems arising from wearing the shirts.  Similarly claims for the superiority of the materials in the official shirts can be exaggerated.  I have ‘fake’ branded t shirts bought in Turkey that have lasted well.

Sweatshop labour keeps costs down

More serious is that the counterfeit shirts can be sold at £15 or £20 because they are produced in sweatshop conditions usually by women and illegal child labour.

No doubt like all cheap clothes this is an issue.  Other fast fashion clothes you can buy in Primark can also be a health issue. Nevertheless you get the impression that the big pressure put on official public health and trading standards bodies is from corporate capital trying to protect their market.  There is a certain hypocrisy in the way official corporate shirt producers hold up their hands in horror at the exploitation of sweatshop labour by the counterfeiters. Most big brands source their clothes from low wage, factories in places like Bangladesh where working conditions are just as poor.

Chloe Long – deputy director general at the Anti-Counterfeiting Group is quoted by the BBC as saying: “the counterfeiters have no morals, no standards, and the only thing they are motivated by is price”

As if Nike or Addidas is motivated by anything else but price and profit or moral standards for that matter.

What socialists want

Socialists are opposed to sweatshop counterfeiters. Many of the websites and some of the production are based in China. Given the censorship and control in China it is difficult to get a fuller picture or to deal with the problem. We are also opposed to the big brand official shirt makers too.

The football club official shops also join in defending the corporate. They support the anti-counterfeit agencies in order to defend their margins. Little effort is made to work with all the clubs to pressure corporate capital to lower prices or to limit the yearly change of official shirts. We should demand transparency about the whole breakdown of costs involved in making the branded shirts. Again the BBC report takes as gospel claims about the additional costs of design and meeting regulation made by an industry representative

In this system, we have a false choice between paying £85 for an official shirt or £15 for a counterfeit one. We have a choice of paying over the odds to corporate capital making billions in profits or buying a poorer quality product that may cause health or safety issues.

The BBC reporters failed to look at the issue from the point of view of the needs of working class football fans who cannot afford the official shirts. Nor did they question at all the business models of the clubs or the big brands. The only thing they could think of was to organise some vox pops to guilt trip fans buying counterfeit shirts about the conditions in the sweat shops. Nobody was asked what they thought of the overall system and corporate interests.

Selling and buying football replica shirts reveals a lot about how our society is run. The decisions about what is produced, how it is produced and the price are taken by small groups who run or own the big corporate brands. In turn these brands are increasingly influential in how football is run as a sport. The vast majority of us are excluded.  

As Marx predicted in the Communist Manifesto:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” (chap.1)

We need to win the argument among workers that we could produce and use a much better product if we controlled this production. We could impose correct working conditions and decide on making quality products that last and do not harm the environment. We could save much of the wasted resources used in advertising that lies about we really need.

We would be producing much more than a shirt.