We were sat in an old student house, playing Pro Evo on a rubbish TV, trawling through eBay on our laptops when we came across it. “One of the first gems we ever unearthed was a Mark Hughes match-worn 1988 Man United third shirt. The most sought-after vintage shirt is the Holland Euro ’88 shirt – insanely popular for the crazy Adidas design as much as Marco Van Basten’s goal. The oldest we’ve sold was a 1935 West Brom FA Cup Final shirt and the most expensive went for £10,000: Juventus’s classic blue-and-yellow strip, match-worn in the 1996 Champions League Final. “Since 2006 we’ve built what we believe to be the biggest football shirt collection in the world. Here, four shirt dealers tells us about everything from the rarest kits to the ones most likely to fetch big numbers, and why a Dutch shirt from 30 years ago is the collectors’ holy grail. Dealers are springing up all the time, stocking everything from Premier League classics to niche J League one-offs. Reselling vintage football shirts is a booming business. Even the kit manufacturers themselves are drawing inspiration from the designs of yesteryear. Nike released a USA 94-referencing Nigeria shirt, sending hypebeasts wild. Patta now collaborate with Umbro rehashing Nineties Ajax kit. They want shirts that feel individual and exciting – ones that remind them of a more innocent time.īrands have been quick to jump on the trend. Fans have grown tired of sterile, template designs and three Premier League kits being churned out every season. Founded by two students in 2006, today they sell vintage kits into the hundreds of thousands. Because woven in with the polyester is a priceless thread of nostalgia.Ĭlassic Football Shirts is one of the UK’s biggest traders in the game. That crumpled England top in the bottom of your wardrobe? Yup, it’s probably worth something. In 2019, old shirts are bringing in big numbers and that doesn’t necessarily mean match-worn kit, either – given a few years to age, a bog-standard Sports Direct replica has the potential to capture the imagination of fans. Or take this outright bonkers 1995 quilted-padding goalkeeper jersey: swirling blue-upon-blue colourway - yours, for a cool £1,250. United might charge £65 a pop for a brand new replica but that’s mere pocket money compared to a 20-year-old shirt with “Beckham” on the back, which now fetches £350. In other words, nearly one-and-a-half Paul Pogbas.īut it’s not just new kit that’s worth something. Manchester United alone shift nearly two million shirts every year – worth more than £120m. Today, football kit has become a multi-billion pound industry. Replicas were sold for a fiver (or £9 including the shorts and socks). In 1974, Admiral began producing the official England kit.
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