Replica Shirts – Why ?!
By Adam Leese
I’ve always found the buying of replica shirts rather strange.
Obviously kids love them. Why wouldn’t they? They get to be Rooney, Torres, Drogba etc, and more importantly I suspect, get to show off to all their mates.
Adults however, having surely given up the dream of scoring the cup final winner for their team a long time ago, and presumably having friends that have grown up a bit since being impressed by the latest hideous, over priced offering from their club of choice, must have an all together different reason for buying them.
A sense of belonging perhaps? A sense of identity? Maybe it’s intrinsically built into the modern day football fan that they must buy the latest replica shirt as some sort of duty owed to their club every two years and just in time for their summer holidays.
Football club shirts, and football club merchandise in general have always seemed to me to be more popular in other parts of the world than they are in their team’s country of origin. Walking down the street in Bangkok over the past week I have seen all too frequently Rooney, Torres, Drogba etc walking past me (minus the manufacturer’s logo of course.)
The Premier League’s global appeal really hits home out here, with seemingly every bar showing some sort of Premier League match, regardless of when it actually took place.
Club’s logos seem to be put on any product you care to imagine on the local markets. Chelsea kettles, Fabregas neck scarves, I even walked past a stall selling t-shirts with the slogan “ 25/10/0. Liverpool 2 – 0 Manchester Unite. Torres, N’gog.” The stall owner assured me he could find something to suit my tastes, but reluctantly I turned him down.
Having been here for a week I’ve been struck by the number of people wearing replica shirts, and by how when anyone learns that you are British, all they want to do is talk to you about football.
People out here use the Premier League as a way not only to sell their products, but as a way to welcome and talk to Western tourists and wearing a replica shirt certainly seems to do that.
Seeing a Manchester United fan seemingly inconsolable after Wolfsburg’s goal on Tuesday night (a game Man Utd went on to win) the Thai barman couldn’t understand why he was so upset.
That particular fan may have been wearing his replica shirt to give himself some identity in this foreign city, but many other Westerners out here seem to do so out of fun, almost as a parody of a bad Brit abroad. This is the preferred option it seems to me, a sense of taking the piss out of oneself rather than getting morbidly depressed over a goal conceded. After all as a football surely the ability to take the piss out of oneself is an all important part of being a football fan?
Mulling over this thought, and having made my way through a few beers, I decided that the wearing of football shirts is done for many different reasons across the globe, but essentially completely unoriginal. I therefore drunkenly decided to get myself a superior football shirt, if only to take the piss out of myself.
I went to back to the stall owner and got him to print me something unique.
I am now the proud owner of a t-shirt emblazened with the slogan “5/12/09. Newcastle 2 – 0 Watford. Lovenkrands, Pancrate.”
