Short life of football shirts sparks call for radical recycling
When Joanna Czutkowna buried a Manchester United jersey, a cotton T-shirt and a wool-cotton jumper on her Lancashire farm and dug them up a year later, the video went viral. The T-shirt had disappeared, apart from the seams (sewn with polyester thread), the jumper was 80% gone, but the United shirt remained – grubby but indestructible.
Czutkowna, who has worked in textiles and sustainability for 20 years, used the experiment to question the current business model for replica shirts and the way brands prize iconic designs. Diego Maradona’s Argentina top from the Hand of God World Cup quarter-final against England in 1986 sold for more than £7m at Southeby’s in 2022, and Cristiano Ronaldo’s shirt number became his identity, yet Premier League shirts are described as transient, eye-wateringly expensive and unsustainable.
“Every season the majority of shirts increase in price, by an average of £5,” she says. “A Spurs shirt, for example, costs £90. And yet by early February there is significant discounting, sometimes by 55%. So something that already has a short shelf life has an even shorter full-price life. A rethink is needed.” Fans frustrated by repeated new releases and rising costs have turned to the counterfeit market during the cost of living crisis, and The Athletic estimated that a third of all Premier League shirts sold are fakes, costing clubs lost revenue.
One route to reduce waste is extending a design’s lifespan: Labour’s Football taskforce tried to enforce wearing a shirt for more than one season in the 1990s, and Brentford have been wearing a shirt for two seasons since 2021 (with an anomaly year in 2025-26 because of betting sponsoring coming to an end). Czutkowna proposes trade-in services and rental models so clubs can control old kit and find new uses, arguing the prevailing idea that a shirt is disposable must change.
Material choices complicate recycling. Polyester is made from crude oil, and while most replica Premier League shirts are now made from recycled plastic bottles, Czutkowna warns: “We used to think this was an advance, however plastic bottles can be made into more plastic bottles in a closed loop process, so putting them into shirts spoils that. There are also reports that new plastic bottles were being made purely to be chipped down to be made into shirts, and ethical concerns over who and how plastic bottles are collected.” She adds: “Very chemically intensive and, again, when it is mixed with a blend it becomes very difficult to recycle. Even if we used cotton, it requires a lot of land and chemicals, you’d still be in a system that promotes a shirt to be obsolete.” She points to Puma’s textile-to-textile shirts as a positive example of design intended for recycling.
Quantifying the problem is difficult, but UEFA estimates that 60% of the professional kit used by clubs is destroyed at the end of the season, and 20m shirts were estimated to go to waste after this year’s Fifa World Cup, largely due to intellectual property rights. With the Premier League growing in popularity globally, the number of shirts produced is only going to grow; while some end up with charities such as KitAid, many are destroyed.
If resale in secondhand markets is not available, shirts can be turned into new products such as bucket hats, which gets round IP rules by cutting the sponsor out, or shredded for insulation or dog beds. There is scope for clubs to build revenue from resale, repair and rental rather than treating replica kits as single-season commodities, and Czutkowna notes: “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.”
“A lot depends on leadership,” says Czutkowna. “The Premier League could mandate that no excess kit could be destroyed, something that is being enforced legally in the European Union for fashion, and at the same time clubs need to look at what they’re allowed to do to old shirts before they sign sponsorship agreements.” This is an extract from our newsletter, The Hotspot. To subscribe just visit this page and follow the instructions.
