Every day is soccer jersey day
By Leah Asmelash, CNN
(CNN) — Soccer jerseys! Who doesn’t have one? Olivia Rodrigo partnered with Spotify for a now sold-out throwback FC Barcelona jersey stamped with her bubbly monogram over the red and blue vertical stripes. The Gap has two limited-edition summer collections featuring jerseys inspired by “football culture,” while Nike has two collections of Latin American-themed “statement” jerseys “rooted in the culture and emotion of the game.”
Also some people are wearing jerseys to play soccer in stadiums.
Many of these proliferating jerseys are not meant to be replicas of the game gear worn by favorite athletes. Instead, their designs either nod to official team jerseys or do something else entirely. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to commemorate the city’s involvement in the World Cup, oversaw the release of retro-look striped New York jerseys — originally priced at $50 in an affordability initiative, but now listed on the luxury resale site Grailed for more than $1,000.
In lieu of a team badge, the jerseys in Mamdani’s municipal merch drop feature a soccer ball emblem. This World Cup summer, soccer is not just a team sport but a style, as jerseys have made the leap from die-hard fans to people aiming to look cool.
Like the polo shirt or rugby stripes before it, the soccer jersey is transcending its associations with the sport. Its basic form — a simple pullover with short or long sleeves and optionally a collar — makes it harmonize with other clothing better than a baseball or basketball jersey would, while vibrant colors or sharp graphics make it stand out.
“That pink Inter Miami jersey, I feel like a cool girl might wear that on the dance floor in New York,” said fashion magazine maker Markus Ebner. “Not because she’s an Inter Miami fan; because it’s pink and it’s cool.”
While soccer is the most popular sport in the world, its position in the US has been more of a “slow acceptance,” said fashion photographer Phil Oh. Ten years ago, there were certain stereotypes around wearing jerseys, Oh said — hipsters calling the game “footy,” for example, a try-hard association inspiring eye rolls.
But as soccer has grown more popular stateside, so has the jersey. Streetwear brands were especially early adapters: Supreme made a soccer jersey with Umbro in 2005, a time when soccer broadcasts in the US were still scattered across niche or premium channels. In the early 2010s, Snoop Dogg became known for incorporating a variety of soccer jerseys into his wardrobe, even those of warring teams, drawing some side-eyes from die-hard fans. Drake wore a pink Juventus away jersey in 2016, a move seemingly so rare for a rapper of his stature that eBay listings still sell the jersey as a “Juventus x Drake.”
It was around that time that Josh Warwick, one of the co-founders of Cult Kits, a vintage soccer jersey retail website, began noticing a shift. The jerseys were being bought by people who weren’t just soccer nerds or fans looking for deep cuts. At a Cult Kit pop-up in New York in 2022, Warwick recalled some young women in their early 20s coming in and leaving with a “really random” neon yellow Blackburn Rovers away shirt from 1996, a relic of the first-division years of a team that had been mired in English soccer’s second or third divisions for a decade.
“That was quite a good illustration of the way that football shirt culture is diversified from just people who just love the club or love the game to actually people who really appreciate the aesthetic of the shirt as well,” Warwick said.
The jersey trend in the US has grown so much that in the last two to three years, the US has surpassed the UK to become Cult Kits’ biggest market. And the ubiquity with which the soccer jersey has been adopted by various brands signals growing demand.
Designers big and small have recently released a slew of remixed soccer jerseys, emblazoned with brand names across the chest where the sponsorship would usually go: Miaou, Nahmias, Aimé Leon Dore and Ksubi, among others. Fast fashion retailers have joined in, as fast fashion retailers must: H&M released a collection with Lotto earlier this year, while ASOS now sells a variety of knockoff national jerseys.
Along with the boom in vintage jersey sales has come a growing market for newly made replicas of the originals: Both Fanatics and Nike now sell reissues of soccer jerseys from the 1990s, while Ebbets Field sells new gear from the defunct North American Soccer League, including reproductions of the bright yellow and green New York Cosmos jersey worn by the aging Pelé in the ‘70s.
Designer Colm Dillane of KidSuper, a longtime soccer fan, released a collection with Brazilian legend Ronaldinho in 2024. The star even walked the runway at Paris Fashion Week that year, wearing a T-shirt printed with his own face — a nod to bootleg shirts sold all over the world — underneath a thick fur coat. But this year, ahead of the World Cup, Dillane designed a jersey with Complex and Bank of America, a sign of just how commercialized the soccer jersey phenomenon has become.
Part of the reason for the growing trend comes down to money, Oh said.
“The accountants on the team say, ‘Oh, well, soccer is big, and it’s a growing market, so go do something there,’” Oh said. “On the other hand, maybe the interest by the designers has always been there, they just never been allowed to express it, because athletics was seen as an opposite medium to fashion.”
The fashion industry has been struggling in Europe and China, while seeing growth in North America, Ebner said. The World Cup, which is being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States, has given the industry a chance to capitalize on that market, he said: “Everyone has been kind of scrambling to come up with something, to have a product ready.”
Soccer jerseys were initially marketed toward children in the 1950s, when clubs would sell the entire kit — the shorts and the shirt. There were no sponsorships on the front, no club badge, and the designs were “pretty simple,” said Brian D. Bunk, historian and author of “The Shortest History of Soccer.” The kits weren’t meant to be fashionable; they were meant to play soccer in. A youth team might buy a set of uniforms, he said, or a kid may purchase one endorsed by their favorite player.
Detailed replica jerseys came later. As clubs began trademarking their designs, making the jerseys readily identifiable as Manchester United, or Arsenal, or whatever team, the shirts began to be marketed as leisurewear, Bunk said, though still only for children and teenagers.
That started to change in the 1980s. The rise of color TV meant viewers could see the jerseys better, and the fitness boom meant athleisure was becoming more socially acceptable for adults. Slowly, jerseys were targeted toward fans of all ages.
“If you look at pictures of stadiums in 1980, no adult has a replica shirt on,” Bunk said. “Then 10 years later, you’ll see a bunch of them.”
In the early 1990s, Manchester United opened its megastore at Old Trafford, selling replica jerseys and other logoed gear. While Manchester United was criticized at the time for trying to extract “as much money as they could from as many different sources,” Bunk said, other teams followed suit. What was once a sign of the overcommercialization of soccer became just another part of the game.
Today, a Manchester United replica jersey with a player’s name on the back runs about $200; a 1990–92 reissue jersey from Adidas, not a genuine vintage product, is at least $155. And the clubs redesign the jerseys every year — as opposed to every couple of years, the norm a few decades ago — increasingly incentivizing fans to buy a new jersey every season.
As the fashion industry embraces these jerseys, some teams are leaning in. Venezia FC, an Italian club that has spent much of its history down in Serie B, has collaborated with creative agencies for its jersey design and highlighted team shirts as lifestyle first in promotional images — models tuck the shirts into pleated pants and wear them in restaurants and on boats. Similarly, the Nigerian national soccer team was part of a Nike capsule collection for which designers created fashion-forward jerseys for multiple countries. Launched ahead of this year’s World Cup, the fact that Nigeria failed to qualify for the competition seemed to matter less than the team’s reputation for having standout jerseys.
The optimistic view: Soccer jerseys as fashion is a sign that the US is finally learning to love soccer as much as the rest of the world. The pessimistic view: The trend is instead an example of the fashion industry learning what soccer teams discovered decades ago — jerseys, like ticket sales, are just another valuable revenue stream.
But true soccer fans know the value inherent in a jersey, especially original ones. Cult Kits’ Warwick, a longtime Ipswich Town fan, has a cherished match-worn 1991-92 jersey, long-sleeved and bright orange, the type of shirt he would never wear casually. Umbro, the jersey manufacturer, has reissued some older Ipswich Town jerseys from the 1990s, as other manufacturers have, but not this specific one. For the last game of the 2025-26 season, after which Ipswich Town was promoted to the English Premier League — a special occasion — Warwick wore the jersey for the game, just “showing off a little bit,” he said.
Even in an increasingly saturated market, jerseys still carry weight. Ten years ago, a boy in Afghanistan went viral after he was photographed grinning ear-to-ear in an Argentina Lionel Messi jersey he made out of a striped plastic bag; Messi later sent him two autographed shirts and eventually met him. In a letter to his late sister published ahead of this year’s World Cup, Ivory Coast starter Yan Diomande recalled a fake Manchester United jersey he’d received as a kid in Abidjan; with a black marker, he wrote “RONALDO” and a giant block “7” on the back.
“This is why I have always had references to football culture in my collections,” said designer Martine Rose in 2023, after designing a collection for the US Women’s National Team. “Because of how widespread and powerful the game is and how it has united people; how it brings people together, how it gives people hope.”
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