When I played soccer, the last thing I ever wanted to think about was what I looked like. There are only a few moments when a teenage girl can experience her body as principally an instrument of strength, instead of as an embattled site of self-conscious self-presentation. For me, soccer was that occasion. If getting dressed most mornings was a belabored process of adolescent angst, the uniform instead was mechanical, antiseptic, blissfully absent of self-expression and so immune to judgement. The things I wore on the pitch—the shinguards and the shaggy socks and the junky bought-in-bulk synthetic shirts —were less than an afterthought. They seemed to me to be anti-clothes, and I loved them for that.
But it’s always those things that insist on their own practicality and seem to repudiate “fashion” that soon become irresistible to it. No one wants to wear my ratty, red-and-white kit made of low-grade plastic (ca. 2012). They do, however, want to wear the ratty, garish jersey made of vintage plastic that Carlos “El Pibe” Valderrama wore for the Colombian side in 1990. Maybe that tournament was the first World Cup they ever watched. Maybe they’re from the city of Santa Marta where El Pibe was born, or maybe their dad won’t shut up about the draw with West Germany, or maybe they’ll just never forget the way Carlos’s blonde curls glittered against the jersey’s sunshine yellow.
Vintage resale for retro jerseys is a bigger business than ever, mirroring the popularity of secondhand clothes more broadly. Unlike its counterpart, though, the market for old kits isn’t as reliably governed by top-down trend cycles or agreed-upon valuations. And this secondary market has existed only for a few decades, so the stock is erratic and the volume uneven. Values are rooted in a more whimsical kind of calculation. Almost everyone can agree on what a Chanel classic double-flap bag in perfect condition should cost, but how do you put a price on a sweaty scrap of polyester worn by a hometown hero? And what are we paying for, exactly? My shitty varsity jersey was precious to me because of its weird asceticism, its plain utility. But in the world’s biggest football arena, which is so laden with symbolism at every level, the World Cup kit is a form of idolatry, and a vintage shirt is a sort of prayer.
The resale market is a mercurial place, and when it comes to sourcing and pricing, there’s basically no blueprint. “Sometimes we go all in on something and it will sit on the shelf for three years,” said Matteo Trevisani of Golaco Kits, a vintage retailer. “And sometimes we seriously underestimate things. That’s the beauty and the risk of the shirts.” Divining their sales potential is as difficult as predicting a scoreline. After Italy failed again to qualify for this World Cup (to the horror of my Neapolitan father), prices for the team’s old jerseys fell across the board. That means it’s time to buy, according to Trevisani, to stock inventory for the 2028 Euros; when Italy makes the cut—a Dio piacendo— they’ll be able to charge a premium.
For most soccer fans, regional club teams will be their first point of contact with football, and their kits do dominate the secondhand market. But the national team jersey has a singular and inimitable social function. Particularly for those parts of the world granted few opportunities to succeed before a global audience, and for those communities splintered into global diasporas, it’s a declaration of cohesion. Trevisani told me that a few years ago, at the height of the Gaza bombardment, Golaco received a large shipment of Palestine national jerseys. “They just flew off the shelves,” he told me. The kit delineates and, in some small way, defends the idea of the nation, even when the real thing has been ripped away.
For most soccer fans, regional club teams will be their first point of contact with football, and their kits do dominate the secondhand market. But the national team jersey has a singular and inimitable social function.
The garments worn in moments of unforeseen, long-shot heroism or extra-strength fortitude also inspire a particular warmth among buyers. One beloved shirt—worth around $300 on resale sites—is Senegal’s 2002 away jersey, which they wore in their first-ever World Cup appearance. Their valiant 1–0 win against France, the reigning champions, sent them on a deep run in the tournament and cemented the cult status of the team—and therefore the kit. Everyone loves an underdog, and there’s a whole class of treasured shirts sold secondhand to salute them.
Some shirts, despised when they first appeared, have had their ugliness recast as adorably zany. The 1994 U.S. men’s “denim kit” is one of these: stone-washed, emblazoned with a spray of distorted white stars, the color of your dad’s most ancient pair of 501s. Even without the matching denim cutoffs (which never made it onto the pitch), the design was a fever dream of Americana, and everyone hated it. “We wanted the world to see us as a soccer nation,” midfielder Tab Ramos told The New York Times. “And here we come with these uniforms that were just ridiculous.” Thirty years later, the state of American soccer is still uncertain, but the passion of the American consumer remains inviolable; the nostalgic 1994 kit does so well on resale sites that Adidas, taking notice, announced a “throwback collection” in March with near-identical “denim jerseys.”
In the pantheon of audacious designs, Cameroon has always been on the cutting edge. In 2002, the team debuted an unprecedented, sleeveless shirt. It was meant to allow for more freedom and mobility in hotter climates, and it signalled African soccer’s refusal to conform to European standards. It also had the bonus effect of showing off a lot of excellent biceps. The shirt was banned by FIFA ahead of that year’s World Cup, at which point Puma added a black sleeve that looked like it had been reluctantly tacked on. Cameroon wasn’t deterred. Two years later, still with Puma, they upped the ante by introducing the world’s first soccer bodysuit. The single-piece garment zipped open at the shoulder, rather than snapping under the crotch (as is customary for partygoing women everywhere). The move provoked another villainous response from the FIFA overlords: “You cannot play a game against the laws of the game. We are the guardians of the laws of the game—the laws are universal,” President Sepp Blatter declared. For whatever reason, the bodysuits don’t appear to be especially popular on the secondhand market, but the sleeveless shirt worn by number 9, Samuel Eto’o, is in high demand.
As with all fashion subcultures, scarcity is a guiding principle. Replica shirts first arrived on the scene in 1973, but it wasn’t really until the ’90s that their production, promotion, and sale became widely commercialized. Match-worn shirts will always be more valuable, but even some replicas are hard to find, simply because they’re a relatively new invention, and because the lifespan of a World Cup kit may have been as fleeting as a few glorious days. The 1989 home kit for the Soviet Union, meant to be worn at Italia ’90, was cherry red, with an all-over pattern that I would classify as a “light acid wash” but has been described elsewhere as “red meat.” That alone might make it a coveted collector’s item, but it also happened to be the last national jersey ever produced for the USSR; if you can find one, it normally sells for around $600.
Then there’s the problem posed by the jersey that was only ever made for one. Even the outfield kits with the most limited of runs were originally issued to at least ten players, but the goalkeeper’s uniform, like the player himself, stands alone. Trevisani pointed to Japan’s 1998 goalkeeper jerseys as especially rare. The design was gnarly—a full-length eruption of orange and yellow flames against a black background, rendered like a comic book illustration. It debuted the first year that Japan qualified for the Cup, marking the formal arrival of Asian football on the world stage. I was able to find one full set, complete with the original Japanese tags, on eBay, with bids starting at $3,300.
Despite all the incalculable market forces of politics, personal histories, and game improbabilities, some clear patterns have emerged among vintage consumers. All the suppliers I spoke to agreed, for example, that the 1990s were something of a golden era. “By the end of the 1980s, the brakes came off,” said Josh Warwick, cofounder of the resale site Cult Kits. The iconic shirts from that decade—West Germany’s energetic 1990 zig-zag in the national colors; Nigeria’s chic, clean green; Jamaica’s swaggy, collared look; the flashy flames on the blue sleeves of the Japanese side; France’s classy nod to the Breton stripe; Mexico’s Aztec-inspired illustrations—were all graphic and dynamic, dripping with charisma. They all had something to say about the spirit of their national identity, and they said it without apology.
It was the apogee of a long evolution in construction and style. The very earliest shirts in the 1930s and ’40s, all made of heavy cotton or wool blends, were extremely simple; usually a single, uniform color based on the national flag. Kits then were not yet pieces of high-tech activewear. As far as design elements, sometimes they included badges, but numbers weren’t even introduced until 1954. The ’60s and ’70s saw the introduction of synthetics and a handful of new formats, mostly experimenting with sleeve lengths and collars. But I see the main achievement of this era as one of colors, which were refined in this era and turbocharged into signature looks: think of Italy’s deep, dimensional blues, or Pelé in his radiant yellow and green.
The ’80s saw the arrival of genuine ornamentation: abstract shapes, fades, stripes, and pictorial motifs all found their way onto the pitch, not to mention some of the plunging-est necklines ever seen, allowing players to further accessorize with the addition of bared chests and gold chains (FIFA didn’t ban jewelry until 1997). The polyblends in this era made all the players appear gently sparkly, exalted by the summer sun in Spain and Mexico. Belgium’s optical-illusion 1982 kit, which trailed a stripe from the torso down to the shorts, is one sought-after standout, and an honorable mention (it was designed for the Euros) goes to Holland’s pale-orange, rhomboid fish scales from 1988.
Despite the auction history of certain ’80s kits, it is the nostalgia of the ’90s that arguably powers the entire resale market.
The holy grail of all the vintage jerseys is Diego Maradona’s from 1986, the one he wore as he delivered two iconic goals for Argentina against England: one, a mazy run widely considered the best World Cup goal of all time, and the other assisted, mythically, by the “Hand of God.” In his book El Partido, Argentine sports journalist Andres Burgo called that match “a footballing aleph,” which is to say, like Borges’s own literary symbol, the shirt signifies a form of infinity, a point in space that contains all other points. So Maradona’s shirt is the vintage kit that encompasses and ennobles all other vintage kits. It went to auction at Sotheby’s in 2022 and was sold for $9.3 million, the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia in history.
Despite the auction history of certain ’80s kits, it is the nostalgia of the ’90s that arguably powers the entire resale market. Both Trevisani and Warwick noted that those kits are vastly overrepresented in sales, prized not only by hardcore fans but also by casual shoppers seeking the synergy of soccer and streetwear. The latter group is an especially key customer set in the States, where there are fewer homegrown soccer fans and a shallower culture of national pride around the sport. Mat Davis of Saturdays Football told me he saw “the full gamut” on display at a recent streetwear festival, where he was peddling his wares. He was first approached by a lifelong devoted fan, on the hunt for an authentic 1993 Umbro United jersey with the zipper collar. Then ASAP Mob showed up. “They were like, ‘Damn, this green jersey would look so sick with these jeans I have,’” Mat said. “It was like this random shirt from Sparta Rotterdam.”
The ’90s excelled beyond the extant design conventions, and also preceded a bit of an aesthetic dry spell. “Throughout the noughties and into the 2010s, it’s as if designers all started taking it all a bit too seriously,” Warwick said. “Everything became very conservative and very dull.” There were some exceptions: I like Croatia’s checkered shirt worn in their 2002 qualifying camping, for example, and my mother is partial to the 2010s styles because they’re “tighter,” so you can “really see the form of the body.” The consensus seems to be that Nigeria broke the spell in 2018 with a fabulous lime-green, chevron-patterned kit.
It’s possible that fidelity to the era is more circumstantial. We’re in the midst of ascendent millennial cultural hegemony, a generation of consumers who forged their most salient soccer memories growing up in the ’90s, armed with both the digital literacy and—as they age into middle-adulthood—the disposable income required to shop the bloated secondhand market. In recent years, manufacturers have been pumping out reissues and reinterpretations of old shirts at a breakneck clip. In the lead-up to this World Cup, Adidas unveiled a line called the “Bringback” collection, reimaginging “archive-inspired” looks from competing nations. They also announced that, for the first time since 1990, all their kits at the tournament will feature the old-school trefoil logo. If past design philosophies have coalesced around patterns or silhouettes, today’s paradigm seems to be nostalgia itself. For the sake of profit margins, “it’s easier to just look backwards,” says Mat.
To be fair, I, too, want to look backwards. Everyone does. We long for something resembling a monoculture, when one magnificent moment of soccer could transfix the world. We try not to think about what will happen when we inevitably exhaust the limited supply of vintage jerseys, which are imbued with so much meaning because they predate the onslaught of commercial mass production.
In the meantime, thanks to my foray into the secondhand market, I’ve found that I’ve come around to the idea of kit-as-fashion. In fact, I feel especially tender toward the version of myself that was so desperate for that bifurcation of form and function. And what better way to honor my own nostalgia than by proudly wearing it, same as every other fan? I have my eye on a 1982 Italy player-issue home jersey that’s going for $350. In 1982, my dad would have just turned eighteen, playing four versus four with the neighbors in the apartment complex in Napoli where my Nonna still lives. And I think it would look great tucked into these low-slung orange-tab Levi’s I just bought.