Football Teams Are Churning Out Fashion Collabs. Are Any of Them Good?
All in favour of quality over quantity, please raise your hands.
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I’ve been writing about football teams’ attempts to make inroads into the fashion industry for many years now.
What began as isolated collaborations, mainly between major clubs and prestigious fashion houses (such as Dior and PSG), has now evolved into a more varied landscape and the tactics used by teams to align themselves with the world of fashion have become a little more nuanced.
Arsenal, for example, worked with London-based menswear label Labrum to design its away kit last season, and even let the brand borrow the Emirates Stadium (and Declan Rice) for its London Fashion Week show.
FC Barcelona has increasingly used its connection to the music industry’s biggest stars (Travis Scott, Rosalía, The Rolling Stones, etc.), thanks to its Spotify partnership, to merge its star appeal with one-off jerseys and fashion collection designs around the El Clásico each season. (You can read more about that specific partnership here in an exclusive interview with Marc Hazan, Spotify’s global VP, marketing and partnerships.)
These are isolated incidents where teams and brands have done a good job in fusing the two worlds which not so long ago were considered completely alien to one another.
But naturally, we have reached a point of market saturation.
The issue is that more often than not, collaborations between football teams and fashion/streetwear brands these days are ubiquitous and therefore easily forgettable at best, and at times borderline offensive to both football and fashion fans on either side of the divide.
Let’s take a recent example which rubbed people up the wrong way: Chelsea’s recent collaboration with Drake’s OVO merch line (fashion label would be too generous a descriptor). A full lifestyle collection. When it launched earlier this week, it raised many questions: What was it for? Who was it for? Why with Drake? When was the last time OVO was relevant in any cultural or fashion context?
For these crossovers to have any cultural or commercial impact whatsoever, authenticity is essential. Fans were left wondering what, if anything, was authentic about this collaboration.
First off, Drake is someone who has been seen repping the jersey of just about every single major football team out there over the years, with little clear connection to Chelsea in particular, save for a hangout with Didier Drogba and co. back in the day.
Similarly, British rapper Central Cee (who fronts the collection with an OVO owl on his shoulder) is also someone who has admitted he doesn’t care about football and has been seen wearing every shirt from Chelsea to PSG to Brazil.
According to the caption under OVO and Chelsea’s IG post, the collection is “rooted in legacy”. What legacy that is, remains to be seen.
Chelsea is a team with huge cultural sway and with serious footballing momentum off the back of the team’s Club World Cup victory and Conference League victory months before. As a London-based powerhouse, it has the resources and ability to make partnerships in the fashion world that actually make sense and have a cultural impact. (A Chelsea partnership with Burberry, for example, could generate some real buzz.)
But the OVO collaboration outlines something I always point to when asked about this topic: to operate successfully in the world of fashion as a sports team or organisation of any kind, you need to hire people with real experience from the industry.
Look at the inroads made by the NFL (not long ago one of the least fashion forward sporting organisations ever, but now a cultural powerhouse) thanks to its hiring and promotion of Kyle Smith, its very own in-house fashion editor, who has helped the league align itself and its star players with the highest echelons of the fashion industry.
The same goes for the other side. The fashion brands that have built the most effective sports partnerships are those that have hired people with a dedicated focus on the industry instead of loosely delegating as an extension of their general marketing function. (Read my recent piece on Louis Vuitton’s winning sports strategy here.)
Having institutional know-how means teams are better suited to navigate the complexities of the fashion industry (the network of brands, PR agencies, retailers, federations, fashion week calendars) and helps them understand what is relevant and which opportunities make the most sense from both a cultural and commercial standpoint.
It’s the difference between waiting to broker a partnership with cultural impact and rushing into a collaboration with a brand that hasn’t been relevant in a fashion context (OVO) since long before the pandemic/maybe ever. (People have pointed out that it’s also just an odd choice by virtue of the battering Drake has taken in general culture over the past year or so.)
Sure, some people will buy the gear, and no doubt that the club and the brand will find a way to claim the collection is “sold out,” but teams need to question: what is the actual point? Will people remember this in a year or even six months?
Unlikely.
What Do We Do With All This Merch?
It raises another point about the current football (and general sports) merch market at the moment. Given that we are in an era in which people and companies supposedly care about sustainability, why are we putting out so much stuff?
Take PSG, for example (a team that I’ve praised in the past for its sharp eye in culture and fashion, but not today).
Ahead of the Club World Cup in June, they announced the club was “taking over Los Angeles with the PSG House on Melrose, a dynamic pop-up experience celebrating the intersection of football, fashion, and culture, designed with the US market in mind.” To fill this pop-up, the club announced “a series of high-impact collaborations with global icons in music, art, sport, and design.”
By a series, they meant EIGHT different “headline” collaborations which were released and went on sale at PSG House, including co-branded products with PSG shareholder and NBA star Kevin Durant, J. Cole’s Dreamville record label, Jimmy Butler’s Big Face Coffee brand, and several, several others. Earlier that month, the club also teamed up with The Weeknd to release a jersey and special collection (no idea why). Again, this was clearly a strategic play to tap the club’s North American fanbase, but I still feel prioritising quality over quantity has to be the way forward here.
The reason why Arsenal’s collaboration with Labrum worked so well was that it was genuinely authentic. It was rooted in celebrating the team’s longstanding relationship with players of the West African diaspora, which is also a driving force behind the brand itself.
It also built on years of steady collaboration between Labrum and Arsenal’s kit manufacturer, Adidas (club legend Ian Wright had walked in a Labrum fashion week show a year prior). The designer behind the brand, Foday, is also a genuine lifelong Arsenal fan. It was simple, effective and with good product to back it up that people will wear and treasure for years to come.
These are the collaborations that create cultural artefacts, not just clothes that will end up in landfill sites in years to come.
The market reaction to the Chelsea x OVO collection was a sign of things to come. Fans know when they are being sold stuff for the sake of it, and are getting bolder at calling things out they perceive to be cash grabs.
Football is a beautiful sport with deep cultural heritage and decades of history which inspires myriad creative projects. Teams need to do better and think smarter when it comes to their fashion strategies.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for being here.
See you next week,
DYM
This is DAMN good. I feel less crazy. Cheers!
Round of applause. You know these are my thoughts exactly!