Underground retro football jersey market combines fashion and fandom

Bengaluru

With sportswear companies having successfully expanded their products into streetwear and gained mass appeal, athletic wear like football jerseys still remain their flagship products. The combination of fandom and nostalgia has also led major brands Adidas and Nike to reissue famous old kits, sparking a proliferation in the multi-billion dollar illegal retro football jersey market.

In Bengaluru, such jerseys can be found in the back streets of commercial areas such as Brigade Road and can also be ordered online from dubious sites advertising on Instagram. While the market is in a lull at this time of the year, sellers said they expected demand to increase as the FIFA World Cup nears this sum mer. The appeal is easy to under stand for football fans, but its tryst with fashion is more nuanced.

Stylist Ambarish Sonari explained, “There is something about a retro foot ball jersey that a new drop simply cannot manufacture. They reference a moment, a team era, a player’s legacy, a specificity that feels in creasingly rare in a market fluent in nostalgia but rarely honest about it. To wear a vintage Ronaldinho Barcelona shirt or a faded Italia ’90 kit is to carry an archive on your back.

One that needs no explanation to those who un derstand it.” Shopkeepers in Bengaluru alluded also to how lucrative the business is, without mentioning figures. “All people buy from us both fans and non-fans because it's trendy. Kids like them too. The profit is quite good, it's a good business,” said Irshad, who runs a shop in the Brigade Road area.

The shopkeepers that News Trail spoke to stated that the goods come from China and other Asian countries. Such jerseys are the most affordable in their category in the market and start at Rs 1,000 and can reach Rs. 2,500, depending on the closeness in quality to the real thing, which can fetch five figures. It is typically youngsters and dedicated foot ball fans who purchase them, sellers said.

“Only about 10% of the peo ple who buy them are girls. They're a very fashionable type of person, not everyone wants them,” said Majeed, an other seller in Brigade Road. “The jersey has long since left the stadium. Today it appears over a longline white tee, tucked loosely into wide-leg trousers, worn as a dress with a blazer drawn over the shoulders. Women especially have claimed it as an oversized layer,” Sonari said about how the jerseys are typically styled.

With the illegal market eating into the pie of the authentic brand releases, the small shopkeepers run their business with a certain degree of risk. “We do face some issues with the police. But we get them here only maybe 3 times a year. The brands will complain and police confiscate the goods and fine us some lakhs of rupees,” said Tafsir, a seller in a prominent location in the Brigade Road area.

However, the trend lives on and as long as it gets recog nition in high fashion and the popularity of the sport re mains, it will continue. According to Sonari, “Supreme and Palace gave it credibility on the street; luxury houses gave it permission to go further. Now it occupies a comfortable position at the intersection of sport, streetwear and a particular strain of nostalgia which, at the moment, is one of the most alive spaces in fashion.