Yahoo Finance Buy a Bellingham shirt now – and cash in when England win
Ninety-nine pounds and ninety-nine pence, that’s how much a Jude Bellingham England shirt costs. And for 94 minutes and 33 seconds last night, that looked to be £100 wasted.
But in the space of a second, one overhead kick against Slovakia, a moment of magic to keep England in the Euros, could send the price of his shirt spiralling.
Second-hand football shirts are big business. Gone are the days when old shirts would be donated to the local charity shop or flogged on eBay for a fiver – now, an England shirt with Beckham, Gascoigne or Shearer emblazoned on the back can easily fetch £350.
But who’s going to buy this gear, you might ask? Beyond a clueless Shoreditch yuppie, is someone really going to be inspired to fork out £200 for a Jude Bellingham shirt after a tournament in which he has so far blown very hot and cold?
Just stick it in the Louvre 🖼️🏴#Euro2024 pic.twitter.com/WjIx7jBvE5
— ITV Football (@itvfootball) June 30, 2024
The answer lies not in East London, but rather 3,500 miles away across the Atlantic where the US is quietly experiencing a football revolution. The country is currently hosting the Copa América tournament, next year it will stage the inaugural Club World Cup, followed by the World Cup in 2026 (with Canada and Mexico) and then the Olympics in 2028.
Josh Warwick, the co-founder of Cult Kits, a site dedicated to selling second-hand football shirts, says he now sells more than 10,000 shirts to customers in America each year.
The company, set up by three friends in 2013, has seen a 50pc increase in shirt sales in the past year, but Warwick says this is not down to British consumers.
“In terms of our revenue from the UK, it’s been relatively static for the past three years. It’s largely foreign fans that are driving it and a lot of that is coming from America and Asian markets.
“Because the MLS (the domestic league in the US) is only 28 years old, they don’t have that legacy and that history. They want to tap into that richness of tradition that you get with European football.”
Players transcend rivalries
So what football shirts do these new American fans want to buy? Warwick says the culture is shifting towards fans supporting individual players rather than clubs.
“A lot of younger fans now might not necessarily follow a team, but they’ll follow a player,” he says. “We saw that with [Lionel] Messi and [Cristiano] Ronaldo where there is an obsession with them as players rather than the teams they played for.
“If you imagine a customer in their mid to late-20s from America, they might not care if it’s a Manchester United shirt – but they’ll care that it has [David] Beckham on the back, so I think that’s becoming more and more significant.”
Dan Jamieson, chief executive of the world’s biggest signed football memorabilia company, agrees. “If you ask a kid on the street in Saudi Arabia who he supports, he’ll say Lionel Messi. It’s very much star driven these days.”
Jamieson, whose company Icons.com holds the licences with a number of Europe’s biggest clubs to exclusively sell signed shirts from its players, says his best selling shirts are for players which “transcend tribal rivalries”.
“Luka Modrić in the last year is our second biggest seller,” he says. “It’s because of the way he plays and his charisma and how he acts and holds himself.
“You wouldn’t expect Croatian shirts to go really well but they do for us because it’s sort of ‘I love football and you’d have a Modrić shirt on your wall because he’s just so cool’.
“Twelve years ago, [Andrea] Pirlo was that player. He had just done a cheeky Panenka against Joe Hart and everyone thought ‘that guy is so cool, he just strolls around the pitch doing great things’.”
Jamieson says he is always on the hunt for the next big superstar after Icons signed Messi when he was just 17-years-old.
“You have to kiss a lot of frogs but sometimes you just get it right. I was in the stadium in Qatar watching [Messi] possibly win or lose the World Cup Final, and when he won things blew up. We took in more money in the space of three days than we had in the previous two years.”
‘Bellingham is a new level of superstar’
He believes Jude Bellingham could very well be that next star and has been trying to add the player to his books for the past 18 months. The 21-year-old was named the world’s most valuable player last month after his debut season at Real Madrid, when he was involved in 35 goals.
“Jude has the ability to transcend everything if he continues to deliver,” Jamieson says. “I think if he starts to deliver for both England and Real Madrid, you are talking about a new level of superstar.”
But while cult hero status can go a long way towards giving a shirt value, Jamieson says it’s not “rocket science – shirt value also reflects success on the pitch”, something a spluttering England have yet to achieve this summer.
Doug Bierton founded Classic Football Shirts in 2006 with his best friend while both students at the University of Manchester and now employs 160 staff. He says he’s keeping an eye on lots of different nations depending on how well they do in the tournament.
“The value of a vintage football shirt comes down to three factors. One is on pitch success: whichever team wins the Euros, that shirt will carry a weight to it moving forward, which will add a premium and it will always be one that people hark back to.
“Then there’s the design – is it particularly creative? Has it been well received? Is it culturally significant? And a third kicker would be the rarity of it, was it something which was underproduced? How long was it in the market for?
“For example, the shirt which has gone up in value the most over time and you could have bought in the shop is the Holland 1988 shirt. They won the tournament in it, the only time Holland has won the Euros. People look back and remember the Van Basten volley, Ruud Gullit’s dreadlocks. Plus, the design of it is amazing, it’s culturally significant.
“But also, even at the time it was quite difficult to get your hands on. Holland only wore it at the Euros in 1988. You had to be around that summer to buy it or mail order it out the back of Shoot magazine.”
Bierton is most excited by France’s away kit at this summer’s Euros.
“I love it when they hark back to the 80s and 90s and put a modern twist on it. The away kit this year is a reference back to a shirt from the early 80s.”
He’s also monitoring the progress of Germany, whose bright pink away shirt, nicknamed “the Barbie shirt” by critics, has become the fastest-selling away shirt in the national team’s history.
“The Germany one, I think that almost needs on-pitch success to determine whether that’s a classic or one to beat Germany up about in the future. If they get to the semis and go out in the pink kit, will that be the defining image? But then if they have a historic victory in it, it may be one that everyone romanticises about.”
Romanticism is at the heart of what gives a football shirt value. England might have reached the final of Euro 2020, but it doesn’t live fondly in our national psyche, whether it was down to the ugly nature of the defeat against Italy or the lack of atmosphere in the stadium because of Covid restrictions.
Bierton concedes there is a “long way to go” for the current England shirt before it reaches “classic” status.
“If England bombs out, no one will be romanticising those kits. But if England go and win it, to have that England shirt with all the patches and the Bellingham nameset on the back, that will create a valuable collectable historical item.”
For England fans who think the chances of succeeding in the tournament are pure fantasy, cast your mind back 28 years to the opening game of Euro 96.
Playing at home at Wembley, England drew against minnows Switzerland – with Paul Gascoigne receiving the brunt of the nation’s ire. The following morning the backpages screamed “Out of Gaz” and “Gazza must go”.
Ten days later, Gascoigne scored a goal that’s forever etched in the brain of every England fan as he flicked the ball over a flailing Scottish defender before hitting a first-time volley into the bottom corner.
It takes only one moment for a shirt to write its legacy.