When Joanna Czutkowna buried a Manchester United jersey, a cotton T-shirt and a wool-cotton jumper in her Lancashire farm and dug it up a year later, the video went viral. The T-shirt had disappeared, apart from the seams (sewn with polyester thread), the jumper was 80% gone, but the United shirt remained – grubby but indestructible. (Insert joke here)
The big reveal was not a surprise, certainly not to Czutkowna, who has worked in textiles and sustainability for 20 years, but it was a reminder: a football jersey is not just for Christmas, or even the next hundred Christmases.
Brand designers dream of creating something with the iconic value of the football shirt. Diego Maradona’s Argentina top from the Hand of God World Cup quarter-final against England in 1986 sold for more than £7m at Southeby’s in 2022. Cristiano Ronaldo’s shirt number became his identity. But, at the same time, Premier League shirts have become something almost transient, eye-wateringly expensive yet relevant for a vanishingly small amount of time. Unsustainable many times over.
Czutkowna sees a missed opportunity in the current business model. “Every season the majority of shirts increase in price, by an average of £5,” she says. “A Spurs shirt, for example, costs £90. And yet by early February there is significant discounting, sometimes by 55%. So something that already has a short shelf life has an even shorter full-price life. A rethink is needed.”
Fans agree, many fed up with the feeling of being treated like a walking wallet, ever willing to fork out for another jersey, another season. In a cost of living crisis, increasing numbers are turning to the huge counterfeit shirt market – a market connected to organised crime, child labour, poor wages and a product sold without any safety checks on the dyes used or the fire safety of the material. The Athletic estimated that a third of all Premier League shirts sold are fakes, costing clubs lost revenue.
A more sustainable model might work in various different ways. Clubs could wear a shirt for more than one season, as Labour’s Football taskforce tried to enforce in the 1990s. Brentford are ahead of the game. The Premier League club have been wearing a shirt for two seasons since 2021 (with an anomaly year in 2025-26 because of betting sponsoring coming to an end). Supporters are keen.
Other suggestions from Czutkowna are a trade-in service, where fans would bring an old shirt back to the club in part exchange for a new one, thereby giving clubs control over the next life of old kit, and a rental model. But, above all, changing the idea that a shirt which carries so much emotion and expense for the fan is as disposable as a bag of chips from the van outside the ground.
Polyester, after all, is made from crude oil, although most replica Premier League shirts are now made from recycled plastic bottles, which must be good, right? Not so fast, says Czutkowna: “We used to think this was an advance, however plastic bottles can be made into more plastic bottles in a closed loop process, so putting them into shirts spoils that. There are also reports that new plastic bottles were being made purely to be chipped down to be made into shirts, and ethical concerns over who and how plastic bottles are collected.”
Even gentle-sounding bamboo is not the answer: “Very chemically intensive and, again, when it is mixed with a blend it becomes very difficult to recycle. Even if we used cotton, it requires a lot of land and chemicals, you’d still be in a system that promotes a shirt to be obsolete.” She sees Puma’s textile-to-textile shirts as one of the most positive signs, a football shirt made from old materials and designed to be recycled.
Information on the scale of the issue is not easy to find. Uefa estimates that 60% of the professional kit used by clubs is destroyed at the end of the season, while 20m shirts were estimated to go to waste after this year’s Fifa World Cup, largely due to intellectual property rights.
With the Premier League growing in popularity globally, the number of shirts produced is only going to grow. While some may end up with charities such as KitAid, many of them will end up being destroyed.
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“A lot depends on leadership,” says Czutkowna. “The Premier League could mandate that no excess kit could be destroyed, something that is being enforced legally in the European Union for fashion, and at the same time clubs need to look at what they’re allowed to do to old shirts before they sign sponsorship agreements.”
If resale in secondhand markets is not available, shirts can be turned into new products such as bucket hats, which gets round IP rules by cutting the sponsor out. Shredded shirts can be used for insulation or dog beds.
There is an opportunity for clubs to think more creatively and find new revenue streams from things such as resale, repair and rental. In the words of Czutkowna: “There is a lot of scrutiny of fast fashion, but sport seems to have so far gone under the radar despite its mass reach and volumes.” Respect for the shirt, it would be good to see.
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