Inside fake shirt industry, Arsenal’s news sporting director, Man Utd fan protests

The Athletic FC ⚽ is The Athletic’s daily football (or soccer, if you prefer) newsletter. Sign up to receive it directly to your inbox.

Hello! The trade in counterfeit football shirts is illegal. It’s also booming. We’re going inside the production line.

On the way:

Counterfeit culture: ‘Extortionate’ cost of genuine shirts sees £200m spent on fakes

Football is one of those industries that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, or the value of fewer things than it should.

Case in point one: Manchester United charging £66 ($85) for tickets to watch their zombie-fied season (more on this to come shortly). Case in point two: replica match shirts retailing at up to £125 before any customised touches. Has the game crossed paths with the global cost-of-living crisis?

Shirt sales are a billion-dollar business within a multi-billion-dollar business. Only this morning, Liverpool announced a major new partnership with Adidas and wherever there’s a market so lucrative, counterfeit goods are sure to spring up. The Athletic’s Adam Leventhal discovered this when he stepped into the world of fake kits. In the Premier League alone, genuine tops generate revenue of close to £500m each year. Last season, almost £200m was spent on fakes.

Why? An easy answer can be found in a quote given to Adam by a social media influencer by the name of Peasy. “Myself and a lot of my friends do it because we can’t justify £80 to £120 on a football shirt,” he said. “(You) have to push what you know is probably wrong to one side because of how inaccessible football shirts can be. It’s extortionate.” Fakes cost as little as £8 — roughly the price of manufacturing real versions.

There are problems with these forgeries, though. For a start, counterfeit products are illegal and police in different parts of the world are fighting to stem the supply of them. Second, there’s no guarantee that the materials used are chemically safe, fire resistant or produced in line with any regulations. For this reason, fake tops that are seized cannot even be donated to charity.

They are also prone to scamming and the authorities say links exist between the production of illicit kits and organised crime. But no doubt because of the price of legitimate shirts, the demand for fakes is rapidly increasing.

Who makes them?

A huge number of counterfeit shirts come out of China. One TikTok reviewer told Adam he received a commission from a Chinese e-commerce site for pushing links to its site online. A raid in the city of Hangzhou recovered a stack of tops that, according to law-enforcement officials there, was big enough to fill “20 football stadiums”.

Over time, the tiny island of Malta has become an access point to the European market, with a deep-sea port that allows boats stacked with shipping containers to dock there. An inspector in Malta, Randolph Mizzi, said the illicit production line “might be supporting terrorism, child labour, weapons of mass destruction, human trafficking or drugs”. They shred all the fake tops they can find.

In the UK, while it is not illegal to buy a fake shirt for personal use, a trademark infringement can result in a prison sentence of up to 10 years if you are involved elsewhere in the supply chain. In the United States, it can lead to five years in jail. The authorities have no choice but to tackle the supply of fake kit as a growing number of people feel they are being priced out of football. In a sport that only gets more expensive, the running battle with counterfeit copies has no end in sight.

🎙️ Adam also produced a podcast version of his super article. It’s available on Apple and Spotify.

News round-up

Around the grounds: Protest over Glazers’ Man Utd ownership, City get Nuno’d

(Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)

The ticket prices at Old Trafford we mentioned? Those, along with a whole stack of grievances, were behind coordinated protests staged yesterday against Manchester United’s majority shareholder, the Glazer family. Thousands of fans took part.

Dissent towards the Glazers has been surging for well over a decade, although there’s nothing to say they’re listening or bothered. Operational control of United is now in the hands of minority partner INEOS. Only one Glazer member, the lesser-known Ed, was in town for yesterday’s 1-1 draw with Arsenal. Water, meet the duck’s back.

Sky Sports

I saw United described as a ‘meat grinder’ over the weekend and they do have a talent for mashing whatever passes through Old Trafford. The exception to the rule is the tireless Bruno Fernandes, whose deft free kick (above) ended any pretence of Arsenal plucking the Premier League title from thin air. Stranger things have happened, certainly, but Liverpool stroll on and they aren’t letting a 15-point lead slide.

More compelling is Nottingham Forest’s pursuit of Champions League qualification, which looks like it’s coming up roses. They beat Manchester City 1-0 on Saturday, consolidating third place.

In giving up 69 per cent of possession (as per), they once again did what City used to be so good at doing in reverse: sticking to the plan, trusting the process and bending the opposition to their will. Pep Guardiola was Nuno’d — and not for the first time either.

Around TAFC

• Valencia — the two-time Champions League finalists — are drowning in La Liga. Their owner, Singaporean businessman Peter Lim, hasn’t been seen at any of their games since December 2019 and the club stinks of stasis. Dermot Corrigan reports.
• In contrast, former European Cup winners and six-time German champions Hamburg are getting their act together, finally. Seb Stafford-Bloor wrote about their bid for promotion from 2.Bundesliga. Can they avoid farce this time?
• Olivier Giroud should have been a dynamite signing for LAFC — instead, he is not far off 1,000 minutes without a Major League Soccer goal and he touched the ball just once in the opposition box during Los Angeles’ 5-2 hammering against Seattle Sounders.
• The second part of our MLS general managers’ survey inevitably touched on Lionel Messi’s profile (“Sometimes it’s overwhelming,” said one) but way more interesting was their thorough support for the U.S. calendar falling in line with Europe’s schedule.
• On Saturday, a charity game took place at Wembley between the Sidemen (a social media collective) and a YouTube Allstars line-up. I’m not their target audience and I could be sniffy about it, but a crowd of 90,000 turned up and more than two million people streamed the footage. If you can’t beat them, etc.
• Most clicked in Friday’s TAFC: Diogo Dalot not squaring to Rasmus Hojlund. Epic fail.

Quiz answer

Friday’s question was: which 10 managers, alongside Mikel Arteta, won 100 or more of their first 200 Premier League games?

They are: Guardiola (146), Jose Mourinho (137), Jurgen Klopp (127), Alex Ferguson (122), Rafa Benitez (114), Arsene Wenger (110), Claudio Ranieri (103), Pochettino (103), Gerard Houllier (101) and Kenny Dalglish (101).

Catch a match

(Selected games, times ET/UK)

Serie A: Lazio vs Udinese, 3.45pm/7.45pm — Paramount+/TNT Sports, OneFootball.

La Liga: Espanyol vs Girona, 4pm/8pm — ESPN+/Premier Sports.

Premier League: West Ham United vs Newcastle United, 4pm/8pm — USA Network, Fubo/Sky Sports.

And finally…

For brazen celebrations, Graeme Souness planting a Galatasaray flag in the middle of Fenerbahce’s pitch is in a league of its own. That was his way of marking a Turkish Cup final win in 1996. It’s a miracle he made it out of the stadium alive.

Yesterday, we witnessed a watered-down version as Ardon Jashari stuck a Club Brugge flag in the centre circle at the end of their Belgian derby victory away at Cercle Brugge. The image isn’t as iconic as Souness’ trolling, but it went down with Jashari’s hosts as well as you’d expect.