Classic Football Shirts Review

Where is it?

Online at www.classicfootballshirts.co.uk

Classic Football Co Ltd
Edwin House
Edwin Road
Manchester
M11 3ER

History:

Like most British lads, Doug and Matt love their footy. So much so that during their university years in Manchester, they decided to try and make a bit of extra cash by buying and selling old football shirts.

Doug said: “We started out in a student house with a pile of football shirts on the floor.”

"We’ve got shirts from some teams in Qatar. They’re all really weird colours like peach and salmon."

Fast forward five years to their Classic Football Shirts warehouse off Ashton Old Road. It’s any football fan’s fantasy. Rows upon rows of classic, rare, retro and vintage football shirts of teams from Manchester United to Maccabi Haifa FC and beyond.

“We were trying to avoid getting real jobs” said Doug. “We fell into it really and realised you can make money from football shirts. We were into football in a big way and now we’re into football shirts.”

The Classic Football Shirts warehouse

What do they sell?

“We sell a bit of everything” said Doug. “When we started out it was just all about the retro stuff such as Manchester United and England shirts from the 80s and 90s, but as it’s grown we’ve made sure there’s a shirt for everybody.

“We’ve got shirts from some teams in Qatar. They’re all really weird colours like peach and salmon. In fact we have more weird shirts than normal ones.”

Far from a random selection of football shirts thrown together to make a website, Classic Football Shirts has been organised into clubs, countries, leagues and players. There are also additional sections for shirts that were issued for actual players and, better yet, match worn shirts – sweat and stink included.

The Classic Football Shirts warehouse

The company sources stock from all over the world, but in the UK shirts generally come from individuals who have original, old shirts they want to get rid of for a price. Those prices can range but Doug is the first to admit “some people don’t know the value of their shirts.”

He added: “We deal directly with clubs too. We just took all AC Milan’s old playing kit off them. There’s ten years' worth of their stuff here. The teams and manufacturers want to keep everything streamlined and move onto the new kit, whereas we want to make a market out of the stuff no one wants.”

Prices start at as low as £9.99 and can go up to £200, depending on the rarity of the shirt being sold.  They also buy shirts, so if you fancy making money from football shirts you don’t want anymore, Doug’s your man.

You name it, they've got it

Why go there?

It’s a beautiful game, but these days it’s so much more than that. Fashion, both on and off the pitch, is part of the modern football culture. When footballers first started wearing coloured shirts in the 1800s they wouldn’t have believed the market for replicas would be worth in excess of £200m in the UK, 150 years on.

Classic Football Shirts allows you to wade through generations of the looks that made football what it is today. You name it, they’ve got it.

Doug said: “The oldest one we had was a shirt a West Brom player wore in the 1934 FA Cup Final. It was like a dress. Replica shirts weren’t made for mass sale until the late 70s.”

It’s also worth mentioning the amount of effort that goes in to creating this football attire archive. Doug and the team work 12 hour days trying to source vintage shirts.

“We can’t just ring up a supplier and get shirts from 1996” he said. “It all takes loads of time.”

Retro Manchester United shirt 1975

Who shops there?

Football fans from all over the world. Fifty per cent of their custom is in the UK, 25 per cent in Europe and 25 per cent in the rest of the world. The main foreign countries they receive orders from are Italy, Spain, Indonesia, America and Japan.

“The Far East in general is pretty big” added Doug. “Soon the UK won’t account for 50 per cent anymore.”

Retro Manchester City shirt 1978

Future:

From a living room floor to a warehouse that’s almost bulging at the seams, the business is already beyond Doug and Matt’s expectations. Their aim is to continue to make use of shirts that would otherwise get binned or sit collecting dust.

They bring shirts from yesteryear back to life and having personally visited the warehouse I can tell you there’s more than just rails of shirts in there. You can almost hear generations of phantom crowds cheering and the smell of stale pies.

Verdict:

The Manchester United shirt from 1975 and Manchester City shirt from 1978 Doug showed me (pictured) were incredible. And incredibly old and smelly. You just can’t get that in JJB.

Classic Football Shirts

Classice Football Shirts