The Irish Football Association unveiled its new national team shirt this week.
The shirt, in green camouflage colors with white-orange sleeves, was designed to "represent the feeling of people flying back home and seeing Ireland through the plane."
A lot of thought has been put into the shirt, and the fans hate it.
"Every year it's worse," one wrote, "shocking," another added, "Okay, now show us the real shirt," another fan concluded.
The football shirt industry has risen a notch in recent years.
If in the past teams and teams used to put out standard home / away shirts, today you can find a large number of designs - sometimes in colors that have nothing to do with the team colors, in addition to retro designs or tribute designs for past players and the like.
Napoli, for example, have already put out four different shirts this season in honor of Diego Maradona.
For the fans, who are also the consumers, this is a welcome trend and they are buying everything that goes on the market.
In 2021, Bayern Munich sold 3.25 million shirts, more than any other team in the world, and those who complete the top five are Real Madrid, Liverpool, Manchester United and Juventus.
The shirt that angered Irish fans, Photo: From Twitter
The sponsorship deals with the clothing companies are signed for hundreds of millions of dollars, and sometimes the purchase of a certain player jumps the sale of the shirts by huge sums.
When Cristiano Ronaldo moved from Real to Juventus in 2018, 520,000 of his shirts worth a total of $ 60 million were purchased in one day.
What the teams realized was that the game shirts are the fan's main identifying item - a kind of tag that should always be topical.
Today it is a matter of routine, but once upon a time this was not really the case.
Fan photos from football fields in the 1960s show an audience in everyday clothes, with no signs of the teams on the grass.
The only item that could be attributed to sympathy was a small pennant in the colors of the team or team - and that's it.
It was not until the 1970s, as part of changes in social norms, that it became commonplace to wear sportswear.
Fans began to arrive at the stadiums in the colors of the popular team, adding scarves and hats to them.
Towards the 1980s, clubs began selling shirts with the team logo, and over the years the industry developed into the current situation, where teams invest millions and make millions from the club's clothing - for its variety of models and designs.
"We'll make sure it does not happen in our next models"
The relationship between the fans and the team / team shirts has become so close that sometimes - and as in the case of Ireland - the design is not accepted by the people who are supposed to purchase it.
Last year, when Dortmund went to the Champions League in a new shirt designed by the Puma company, fans were furious that the club logo was swallowed up in the yellow background - forcing the manufacturer to issue an apology: "We'm sorry we angered the fans. .
Lautro and the pretentious shirt of Inter, Photo: AFP
In 2017, a shirt designed for the Spanish national team drew great public criticism because of its resemblance to the flag of the First Republic, and two years earlier Barcelona fans were angry at the caption of the sponsor from Qatar in the center of the shirt.
So what's the secret to a good football shirt that will become a hot commodity in the store?
According to industry top designers, nostalgia and a return to better days.
In an interview with FourFourTwo magazine, Inigo Turner told Adidas: "The shirt should take us to more free days. It should tell a story about the team, the city and the fans."
James Webb, a senior in the industry, added: "We live in an age where a football shirt is not just for stadiums. It's an item of clothing, it's a part of life."
All the designers talk about the shirts in grandiose terms.
Connecting past, present and future, telling a story, exploring boundaries, demonstrating creativity and passion, and more and more.
Instead they can just tell the truth: sell.
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