Arsenal, the £110 new shirt and the nonsense of a price that takes the absolute p***

John Nicholson
Arsenal badge shirt

Is a football shirt worth £110? Arsenal are about to find out, once they’ve fixed a design error which led to their new version withdrawal last week.

There has long been a move to reposition official replica shirts as upmarket ‘designer’ fashion wear, going back to the mid-90s when Newcastle United launched an away strip that was a kind of denim colour – so you could match it with your Joe Bloggs jeans, presumably.

Fans of free market capitalism will inevitably say that if you don’t want to pay £110 you don’t have to (and there is an £80 ‘fan’ version on offer from Arsenal). While this is obviously true, other forces are in play.

Premier League football clubs are not normal businesses which have to make profits to survive. For a start they are given about £150million of free money every year. That doesn’t happen in any other business. And if no-one buys the shirt, they don’t care because shirt sales don’t generate much profit in the first place. The old ‘they’ll pay for the transfer fee with shirt sales alone’ idea is a complete myth.

The Sports Journal looked into this earlier in the year and concluded that if a club sells 100,000 shirts throughout a season, sales of a £75 shirt would generate a total revenue of £7.5million, of which a club would typically receive a 7.5% fee. Therefore, the commission earned by the club would be a little over £562,000.

Manchester United are the best sellers, selling 2.55 million shirts last year and pulled in £106million from those sales. If they’re on 7.5%, they’ve made a little over seven million pounds as part of an approximately £700million turnover. They have 11 players on their books who earn more than that in a year, four of which earn more than double.

Arsenal sold 750,000 shirts costing £77.3 million; that’s under £6m in commission if they’re on the typical 7.5%. If they match those sales with the £110 shirt, their cut of the £82.5m generated takes them just over £6m, which is less than half what they pay Gabriel Jesus alone.

The people making the money are the companies in between the factory and the store. Understandably, fans think they’re putting money into the club coffers by buying the shirt, but in fact most of it is going to the likes of Nike or Adidas and definitely not the people actually manufacturing the shirts in factories in somewhere that isn’t here.

Obviously, the real value in shirts is the branding and sponsorship opportunities, so is the bad publicity charging £110 for a football shirt creates, especially in a time of economic gloom, really worth enduring for the revenue it will generate? Wouldn’t it be better to stop farming it out to such people as Nike et al, go directly to the manufacturer, commission the production, buy the shirts at cost – which is thought not to exceed five pounds – and sell them for a reasonable £15.

Or better still give them away for free and make up the shortfall in revenue by charging more to sponsors on the basis that they’d be seen and worn by many more people.

Obviously, down the pyramid, smaller clubs with smaller fanbases need whatever revenue is generated from shirt sales. Their economic situation is entirely different to the Premier League teams.

The shirt is more important to fans than pretty much anything else. It is all part of the brand of the club. Everything and everyone else in football comes and goes, but the shirt is always there, which is why fans get annoyed when the shirt changes markedly. This is culture and heritage and the latest dumb owner who thinks football is showbusiness, messes with it at their peril. Asking over £100 suggests the underlying assumption is that the more you pay, the more it shows you care. Your loyalty is just another commodity to monetise.

Can’t clubs like Arsenal see how bad the optics are when they’re furiously pulling on the udders of their fans, to milk as much as possible out of them, for something which is the very symbol of the club, the symbol of their loyalty, just to generate a small amount of profit?

It makes no sense, seems very outmoded as a business model in 2023 and fails to see the bigger picture. They deserve a mighty kicking from their own fans for indulging in this rip-off, a rip-off that they don’t even really benefit much from.

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Johnny Nic