The Guide #251: From Oasis to Harry Styles, music is mad for football merch

In this week’s newsletter: After a slow burn for many years, the football shirt has crossed over into the world of music fandom in a big way

Something sartorially strange is happening at gigs across the country. Where once there might have been a sea of (often black) cotton T-shirts across the audience, now a note of heavy polyester has been added to the mix. Last month at Outbreak, the UK’s biggest hardcore punk festival, a sizeable minority of attendees were wearing football shirts – though often not in support of any particular team. Instead, in place of club crests and sponsor logos were names of bands at the festival – Fiddlehead, Alexisonfire, Love is Noise – or for the festival itself.

This isn’t a phenomenon restricted to the hardcore scene. On the tube in London, a day after returning from Outbreak, I saw a gaggle of Harry Styles fans returning from one of his Wembley shows, all sporting bright pink football kits with the One Direction man’s name in place of the shirt number. Practically every band or musical subgenre going is represented with a football shirt. Dua Lipa has one. Deftones have one. Gorillaz have one. OutKast, despite not being a going concern for at least a decade, have one, in collaboration with football mag Mundial. Future Islands have two, including an absolutely gorgeous Napoli-inspired number. Oasis – naturally – have one. (And that’s not to forget the host of bands, from Kneecap to Bring Me the Horizon, with their logos emblazoned on actual football kits, a trend that stretches back to the 90s when Wet Wet Wet were sponsoring Clydebank and the Super Furry Animals were lending their name to Cardiff City’s fetching Welsh cup kit.)

Where has this sudden crossover come from? Lauren Cochrane, a fashion writer for the Guardian who also runs Styles of Play, a newsletter about the relationship between football and fashion, says that music’s embracing of these shirts is “one leg of a wider trend – the rise of the football shirt as a fashion item. You see it on the catwalk, through the rise of vintage kits and through brand collaborations.” It’s a trend that Lauren says was starting to emerge as early as 2012, when skate brand Palace collaborated with Umbro on a series of vintage reworked England kits: “It was a really slow build and then it went mad in the past three or four years,” with labels like Martine Rose and Acne getting in on the act. Lauren points to the ubiquity of the replica football kit at post-Covid editions of Glastonbury as evidence of its wider acceptability – particularly among music fans. “The people who make merch will have seen that and gone ‘let’s put this together’.”

Outbreak had been wanting to do a football shirt for years, one of the festival’s organisers, a Chesterfield fan who has managed to sneak a homage to the League Two club’s 90s kits into this year’s shirt design, tells me – but were worried that there would be no appetite for it. “Before we did it, it always felt like a clash of the cultures and not something our crowd would be bothered about – it was kind of like: ‘Who even likes football?’” he says. “It turns out everybody likes football!”

When the festival did finally take the plunge, releasing a limited edition shirt at the 2024 edition of the festival, it sold out instantly. They’ve since upped their operation, selling both “home” and “away” shirts. Among Outbreak’s always popular merchandise – a lot of this year’s stock sold out on the festival’s first day – the football shirts “always go first before anything else,” the organiser says.

For smaller bands and artists, who increasingly have to rely on merch sales to make a living, this sudden appetite for football kits offers a vital new revenue source. “They are quite accessible to make,” Outbreak’s festival organiser says. “Any merch company has probably seen the boom of it and now has a ‘blank’” – a template that bands, labels or festivals can add their designs to. And, at the top end of the scale, they can be marketed as a luxury, limited edition item amid a sea of standard T-shirts: Lauren notes the increased price for Oasis’s football shirt, which costs about £85, v the rest of their merch for last year’s wildly profitable tour.

But how much of this is a fad? Will the band football shirt fall out of fashion with fans? Lauren points to the baseball shirt, with its coloured sleeves – a ubiquitous piece of band merch in decades gone by, but now out of fashion – as a sign of the band football shirt’s shelf life. Outbreak’s organiser says the festival will continue to make them for as long as there is an appetite – and suggests that, with the World Cup, the appeal of football is only growing.

Though for anyone thinking of investing in a football shirt of their favourite band, be aware that they are not made of the lightweight, breathable modern materials favoured by the likes of Nike and Adidas. These are kits of the proper polyester 90s variety. “People in our Discord [chat forum] were like: ‘Bloody hell, these are really heavy,’” says the Outbreak organiser. “They’re not sweat-proof!” Something to bear in mind for the moshpit.

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