The Early Days

Our aim was simple, we wanted create a destination for fans to buy rare and unique football shirts and explore the history of their favourite teams and players. In the months that followed, ignoring all advice to go and get a ‘real job’ we set about buying as much stock as possible filling up a dingy student house with rails of shirts and eventually in August 2006 launched the website.

With no social media to attract interest we initially struggled to gain momentum, getting just enough money together for adverts in a couple of popular football magazines. But thankfully it worked, helping us to find some loyal and enthusiastic customers, without whom we’d have likely failed. Our days were spent relentlessly buying new stock, with a growing ambition to have a least one item for every recognised team, however obscure.

By the end of 2007 rails were packed into every room, and the daily journey to the post office that started out with just a handful of orders had grown to a full mail sack. We were fortunate to acquire some amazing shirts in the early days, in particular the Johan Cruyff Washington Dips and Joe Royle Man City League Cup Final jerseys pictured on the right. It’s even more fascinating to think that we haven’t had our hands on another Cruyff shirt since.

AC Milan

Despite some relative success, nothing could prepare us for what came next. There were rumours AC Milan had a warehouse with over 15 years of player stock, and when the rumour became a reality we were overloaded with 30,000 items ranging from Shevchenko’s match worn shirt to David Beckham’s underpants. The size of the delivery demanded a bigger space, and we rolled the dice renting a warehouse ironically situated next door to the Etihad stadium.

Early talk of an indoor 5-a-side pitch quickly subsided as we set about working with a number of clubs and brands, and by 2015, to the amazement of friends and family (who were still telling us to get a real job) needed a mezzanine floor to handle new deliveries. Word spread around social media too as fans began sending us pictures of their orders with Valencia flip-flops, Napoli training bibs, Dynamo Kiev player issue shirts firm favourites.

Shops and Exhibitions

2017 saw the expansion of our match worn archive, with a plan to exhibit the very best shirts in our collection. For many years we had built friendships and shared our passion via e-mail or across social media but now we were braced for a truly unique opportunity to connect with enthusiasts and collectors across the World.

We launched at the National Football Museum in March with over 500 jerseys on display and quickly moved on to a 4-day event in London with over 12,000 attendees. In the summer of 2018 collaborative exhibitions took place in Moscow (State Sport Museum) and New York - (Rockefeller Plaza), and in April 2019 our main exhibition travelled to Thailand, with over 9,000 in attendance across 4 days.

Alongside the exhibitions we ran several pop-up shops in London, culminating in a long-term store at the Old Truman Brewery. We wanted to create a special retail experience, capturing all the nostalgic elements of the beautiful game. Soon after we knew we needed a space in our home city, and opened up in Manchester just across the street from our very first office on Deansgate; definitely something we couldn’t have even imagined 10 years ago. You can see cut-outs from the magazines that we grew up with on the walls, sit and play our favourite video games or watch classic VHS alongside browsing thousands of shirts!

A New HQ

In 2020 we relocated our HQ in pursuit of yet more space. We were sad to move from our old home which served us so well, but not before the perfect send off thanks to Matt's childhood hero Ian Wright paying us a visit for an all access warehouse tour. We are excited to make more memories and stock even more items in our new base.

Not without its challenges, 2020 also saw our existing facilities for 5 weeks during the Covid pandemic. During this time, interest in the football shirt community exploded as collectors took part in the #kitsoutchallenge and YouTubers such as our great friend Ellis Plattern took a whole new generation on the journey with him into the crazy world of football shirts. That year culminated with Matt taking on the mission to reunite Ian Wright with his lost trophies after Ian had visited our old warehouse the previous year. Going into the 2020 Euros we created an It’s Coming Home bucket hat which ended up on the BBC breakfast sofa as well as thousands of supporters heads as England went all the way to the Final. We found similar hype with our Christmas Jumper range with the likes of Jude Bellingham posting selfies on Christmas Day sporting his hero Zidane’s festive sweater.