Football Jerseys, the Ultimate Loot of the World's Sport

Thick stripes, round crests, authenticity labels, memorable sponsors, horrendous typefaces, popped collars, a thousand thin lines or V-necks. V for victory, for vestment and for vice. They say football has beautiful things, and the beauty of its jerseys is on display every day. There are plenty of people who have no interest in the sport itself but develop a fetish for a good kit.

Do you remember Fiorentina's Nintendo one? Belgrano's with Potro Rodrigo? Have you ever seen a St. Pauli shirt hanging in an anarcho-punk cultural center? Santiago Motorizado playing a gig wearing an old Gimnasia y Esgrima de La Plata one? Did any of your friends walk into their quinceañera wearing Tévez's number 10 Boca shirt? That's what I'm talking about, and whatever you're remembering right now, too.

For most people, a football jersey is an identity and a legacy, but for many others it's a carnival costume or a uniform, for some it's a work of art or a rag, and there are definitely those for whom it's a piece of erotic lingerie or a neighborhood turf-war trophy. Almost any male under 40 has a close relationship with football jerseys, and almost all of them own more than one.

Increasingly, women also display that fanaticism, carry those banners, go out squeezed into their clubs' jerseys. Take any sample you want, a high percentage of men and women will even remember their first jerseys and, at some point in their lives, will curse their moms for throwing them away or burning them with an iron.

It would be stupid to deny that the transformation of a football jersey into an object of power is tied to certain family rituals, but it's equally stupid not to recognize that it's also a magma of fanaticism forged between video games, secondhand clothing fairs, and Instagram posts from global indie bands.

Fetishistic Instagram accounts like CultKits or X profiles like that of Japanese photographer Masahide Tomikoshi constantly rub in your face the beauty of the most remembered football jerseys across nearly 165 years of the sport's history. But stepping outside and running into a neighbor can also expose you to the same level of haute couture. Not to mention the blocks around any suburban or downtown train station, expedition grounds to the kingdom of the bootleg jersey.

For more than obvious reasons, Argentina has a propensity for secondary markets of used original products, alongside large sectors of new counterfeit goods, whether pirated software or knockoff jerseys. This has led, for instance, to hundreds of jersey traders moving through fairs and social media across the country, hunting down rare finds, charging a premium for fabrics with smudged autographs, lowering the value of whatever jersey you bring them. Because that's how the bazaar has worked from silk to these cotton-elastane-polyester-nylon blends of today's kits.

Those shops and memory dealers, who operate according to the style manual of role-playing game merchants even though they've never played an RPG, coexist with the bootleg jersey shops near train stations -- ranging from any model Maradona ever wore to Niupi kits --, the fairs in peripheral neighborhoods, and the official stores in shopping malls that offer the dual option of fan jersey or player jersey. The hyper-segmentation and emergence of premium products within a single line, collection, or season is also a hallmark of this era of hyper-financialization of interests.

And football jerseys are a type of interest with a lot of pull because they are collectible objects, and one of the most accessible items in terms of collecting, within a fairly liquid market. I'm surprised there hasn't yet been a truly successful NFT collection with 1/1 mints of historic jerseys, as there was one of legendary video game consoles at the time, with X-Consoles.

Perhaps a very lightweight (and non-proprietary) approach to that kind of digital collecting can be found in EA Sports' FIFA saga, now EA Sports FC, which in its Ultimate Team mode offers a TCG where you don't just loot players but also jerseys, fan chants, team nicknames, flags for the stands, and a long list of items where kits, however, always steal the spotlight. In fact, which football game had more licensed jerseys was something heavily considered during the long decade of FIFA vs PES rivalry.

The history of football is, in a way, the history of football jerseys. In 1860, in the first officially recorded match in history, Sheffield United and Hallam's kits were long-sleeved button-up shirts. A century later came the first sponsors and synthetic fabrics, but also public gestures centered on the jersey, like Cruyff playing with only two of the three classic Adidas stripes as a protest.

Today, jersey design is at the forefront of fashion. And of marketing, with cases like FC Barcelona's series of jerseys featuring artists like Drake, Rosalía, Karol G, Coldplay, or the Rolling Stones. In between, Argentina as always has its crowned glory: in this case Martín Tibabuzo, a UBA-trained designer who created the Argentine jerseys for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, River Plate's from 2009-2014, and others for Chelsea, Flamengo, Benfica, AC Milan, and Juventus, plus national teams like Russia, Colombia, and Japan. Flying much further under the radar, indie fans will remember Manta Raya, George Manta's band, the artist also known for designing the kits and visual identity of Aldosivi from Mar del Plata.

The jersey imaginary and anecdotal universe are endless, and I can't imagine a world where football jerseys will permanently lose their value. If anything, I envision a post-apocalyptic future where the surviving jerseys are treated as loot, as a medium of exchange and a measure of value.

How could the Manchester United shirt Cantona wore the day he kicked that fascist Crystal Palace fan ever go to zero? How much will a match-worn Messi jersey from the Qatar World Cup be worth in 25, 50, or 100 years? And what Martian would be able to tell if it's the real deal or a knockoff?

(*) Some time after this piece was published, Juanma made this tutorial on how to make zines and used the original version of this article to create the first 421zine. Little magazines, little jerseys, or, as seen in the photo, d20 dice and discontinued toys: we love collecting things, and football jerseys have everything it takes to be the ultimate loot of the world's sport.