Football shirts are built to last, but the business around them is anything but sustainable. That was the striking conclusion drawn from an experiment in which Joanna Czutkowna, a textiles and sustainability expert with two decades in the industry, buried a Manchester United jersey alongside a cotton T-shirt and a wool-cotton jumper on her Lancashire farm. When she dug them up a year later, the results went viral: the T-shirt had almost completely disintegrated, save for its polyester-thread seams, and the jumper had degraded by roughly 80 percent. The United shirt, by contrast, remained largely intact, if grubby.
The durability of football jerseys is not news to Czutkowna, but the experiment served as a vivid illustration of a broader problem. Football shirts carry enormous emotional and cultural weight - Diego Maradona's Argentina jersey from the 1986 World Cup quarter-final against England fetched more than £7 million at Sotheby's in 2022, while Cristiano Ronaldo has built part of his personal brand around a shirt number. Yet the modern replica kit, worn by millions of fans, is treated as a disposable product with an extraordinarily short commercial life.
Czutkowna points to pricing trends as evidence of a broken model. "Every season the majority of shirts increase in price, by an average of £5," she said, noting that a Tottenham Hotspur shirt now costs £90. Despite the rising prices, clubs often discount unsold stock heavily - by as much as 55 percent - by early February. "So something that already has a short shelf life has an even shorter full-price life. A rethink is needed," she added.
The financial pressure on fans, compounded by the cost of living crisis, has pushed many toward counterfeit shirts. According to estimates from The Athletic, roughly a third of all Premier League shirts sold are fakes, a trade linked to organised crime, child labour, poor wages, and products that bypass safety checks on dyes and fire-resistant materials. This costs clubs significant lost revenue while exposing consumers to unregulated goods.
Some clubs have already begun experimenting with alternatives. Brentford have kept the same shirt design for two seasons since 2021, an approach that fans have responded to positively, with an exception planned for 2025-26 due to the end of a betting sponsorship deal. This model echoes an attempt by Labour's Football Taskforce in the 1990s to limit how often clubs could change kits.
Czutkowna has proposed further solutions, including trade-in schemes that would let fans exchange old shirts for new ones - giving clubs control over end-of-life kit - and rental models for jerseys. She also cautioned against assuming that materials marketed as eco-friendly are genuinely sustainable. While many replica shirts are now made from recycled plastic bottles, she warned this disrupts a closed-loop recycling system, since bottles could otherwise be recycled into new bottles indefinitely. There are also concerns, she said, that new plastic bottles have been manufactured specifically to be broken down for shirt production, raising ethical questions about sourcing.
Bamboo fabric, often seen as an eco-conscious choice, isn't a solution either, according to Czutkowna, as it requires heavy chemical processing and becomes difficult to recycle once blended with other materials. Even cotton, she noted, demands significant land and chemical inputs. She highlighted Puma's textile-to-textile shirt technology - garments made from recycled materials and designed to be recycled again - as a promising step forward.
The scale of shirt waste across football is difficult to quantify precisely, but UEFA estimates that 60 percent of professional kit used by clubs is destroyed at season's end. An estimated 20 million shirts went to waste following this year's FIFA World Cup, largely due to intellectual property restrictions preventing redistribution.
Czutkowna believes meaningful change requires governance. "A lot depends on leadership," she said, suggesting the Premier League could prohibit the destruction of excess kit, similar to legal requirements already in place for fashion within the European Union. She also called on clubs to negotiate rights over unsold or old shirts before signing sponsorship deals, opening the door to alternative uses such as bucket hats, insulation material, or even dog beds when direct resale isn't possible.
"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," Czutkowna said, calling for a shift in how fans, clubs, and manufacturers treat one of football's most enduring symbols.
Based on reporting from The Guardian.