Why are official replica football shirts so expensive?

Football shirts have become much more expensive over the past decade. Supporters’ unwavering loyalty means that clubs possess unusual pricing power, but there are still alternatives. Economics helps to explain both why shirts cost so much and what might be the limits to fans’ willingness to pay.

The average adult Premier League replica shirt costs £76.95 in the 2026/27 season, up from £47.40 in 2014/15. Had prices simply risen in line with inflation, the average shirt would cost around £67.60 today.

Economics offers one explanation for this difference: as with many professional sports, football clubs operate in a peculiar market, where extremely strong brand loyalty limits competition between sellers (Neale, 1964).

But loyalty to a football club does not necessarily imply unlimited willingness to pay for its merchandise. Supporters can buy fewer shirts, keep old ones for longer or turn to cheaper – including counterfeit – alternatives. Whether clubs would ultimately gain or lose revenue from making shirts cheaper therefore depends crucially on how responsive supporters are to the price.

As Figure 1 shows, this is not simply the result of the recent period of high inflation. Average shirt prices have remained above their inflation-adjusted 2014/15 level throughout the period, with the gap widening particularly in recent seasons.

Figure 1: The average price of a Premier League shirt over time, compared to inflation

Sources: The Mirror for historical prices; club websites for latest prices; ONS CPI (the consumer price index, as reported by the Office for National Statistics); author’s calculations.
Note: Inflation comparison uses July CPI for each season; June 2026 used for 2026/27.

Why doesn’t competition keep football shirt prices down?

Competition normally constrains the prices that businesses can charge. Sportswear provides a good example. If Nike substantially increases the price of a running top, some consumers may instead buy a similar product from Adidas, Puma or another brand. The availability of alternatives limits how far any one company can raise its prices without losing customers.

Football shirts work differently. The badge on the front changes the nature of the product. An Everton supporter who thinks the club’s new shirt is too expensive is unlikely to respond by buying a Liverpool shirt instead.

Indeed, fans may also be willing to accept higher prices because buying a shirt can itself feel like a way of supporting their club financially. The enjoyment – or ‘utility’ in the language of economics – derived from buying a football shirt may therefore come not only from owning and wearing it, but also from the satisfaction of having contributed to the club.

Economists describe products as substitutes when an increase in the price of one leads consumers towards another. The strength of this relationship can be measured using what is known as the cross-price elasticity of demand. A Nike and Adidas running shirt might therefore have a positive cross-price elasticity: if Nike raises its prices, demand for Adidas products may increase.

Football allegiance makes this relationship much weaker between clubs. A Manchester United supporter’s demand for a United shirt is unlikely to increase because Manchester City reduce the price of their shirts.

This gives clubs and the companies selling their merchandise a degree of market power: their customers have fewer close substitutes than they would in a conventional sportswear market. The shirt itself may be relatively easy to replicate; the badge and the supporter’s attachment to it are not.

What does it actually cost to make a football shirt?

The price that supporters pay bears only a limited relationship to the physical cost of making and transporting the product.

A breakdown cited by the BBC estimates that, for a typical £85 Premier League shirt, fabric, sewing and shipping account for around 10% of the retail price – approximately £8.50. Marketing, licensing and distribution account for another 11%, while VAT represents around 16%. The remaining 63% is split between the manufacturer, at around 19%, and the retailer, at around 44%. Club shops frequently act as the retailer.

This does not mean that 63% of the price is profit. Manufacturers, retailers and clubs have staff, premises and numerous other costs, while commercial arrangements between clubs and kit manufacturers vary considerably.

But it illustrates an important distinction between the marginal cost of producing each shirt and the price that consumers are willing to pay for it. The badge turns an otherwise fairly ordinary piece of sportswear into a product whose value to supporters cannot easily be replicated by a competitor.

The difference between the price and the cost associated with supplying an additional unit is known as the markup. Firms with greater market power can generally sustain larger markups because their customers are less likely to leave when prices rise. Football clubs potentially possess this advantage to an unusual degree.

Would cheaper shirts actually cost clubs money?

This is ultimately a question about the price elasticity of demand: how much the quantity that consumers buy changes when the price changes.

Consider reducing the average Premier League shirt from £76.95 to the £67.60 it would cost had its 2014/15 price simply kept pace with inflation. That is a price reduction of around 12%.

If 100 shirts were sold for £76.95, they would generate £7,695 in sales revenue. At £67.60, approximately 114 shirts would need to be sold to generate roughly the same amount. Cutting the price by around 12% would therefore require sales to increase by around 14% for overall sales revenue to remain approximately unchanged.

Price elasticity measures the percentage change in demand associated with a 1% change in price. If demand is inelastic, which means that sales respond relatively little to price, charging less reduces revenue. If demand is elastic, a sufficiently large increase in sales can offset the lower amount received on each shirt.

There is an important complication: sales revenue is not the same as the revenue received by the club or retailer.

Suppose production, transport, marketing and licensing costs and the manufacturer’s payment remained unchanged, leaving the retailer to absorb most of the reduction. Using the BBC breakdown as an approximate guide, reducing the retail price towards £68 could lower the retailer’s receipts from roughly £34 to around £26 per shirt.

On that basis, sales would have to increase by closer to 30% simply to maintain the retailer’s existing revenue.

Claims that clubs could therefore reduce prices at little cost should be treated cautiously. The answer depends on how many additional shirts a lower price would sell, contractual arrangements between clubs and manufacturers, and which part of the supply chain absorbs the reduction.

Crucially, there is no publicly available estimate precise enough to tell us how Premier League shirt demand would respond to a particular price change. Without that information, we cannot know whether £77, £68 or another figure would maximise revenue or profit.

Can supporters substitute without changing their club?

This is where the peculiar economics of football becomes particularly interesting. A supporter may have extremely inelastic demand for their football allegiance while having much more elastic demand for an official replica shirt.

Counterfeit merchandise provides perhaps the clearest example. Since January 2026, UK authorities have removed more than 220,000 counterfeit football shirts from sale, with an estimated genuine retail value of £18.5 million, according to the City of London Police.

Research commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office also suggests that price matters. When consumers were presented with a genuine football shirt costing £100, they regarded around £32.50 as the optimal price for a counterfeit alternative. Other government research finds that lower prices and a desire to spend less are important motivations for purchasing counterfeit sportswear.

Counterfeit and official shirts are not perfect substitutes. They differ in legality, authenticity, quality and the destination of the money spent. But they can fulfil a similar basic purpose for a supporter wanting to wear their club’s colours. The larger the gap between the official and counterfeit price becomes, the greater the financial incentive to accept those disadvantages.

This creates a limit on clubs’ market power. A Celtic supporter priced out of an official shirt is very unlikely to buy a Rangers one. But the club is not guaranteed the sale: the supporter can buy an unofficial version, keep an old shirt, purchase other, cheaper, club merchandise, buy second-hand or purchase nothing at all.

Higher official prices can therefore make substitutes increasingly attractive without weakening the underlying loyalty that created clubs’ pricing power in the first place.

Are football shirts too expensive?

The fact that supporters continue buying shirts at current prices suggests that they are not obviously too expensive from the seller’s perspective. If demand is relatively unresponsive to price, charging £77 rather than £68 may simply generate more revenue and profit.

But there is a limit. If sufficiently high prices push enough supporters towards counterfeits, second-hand shirts or out of the market altogether, further increases can eventually become self-defeating. We do not have good enough evidence on the price elasticity of football shirts to know whether clubs have reached that point.

Nor do strong overall sales necessarily mean that higher prices affect all supporters equally. Demand could remain relatively resilient even as lower-income fans are priced out, if purchases become increasingly concentrated among wealthier supporters. The question is therefore not only how many shirts clubs can sell at a higher price, but also which supporters remain able to buy them – and how much that matters to clubs.

The sums involved also need to be put into perspective. Premier League clubs generated £6.8 billion in 2024/25, according to Deloitte – an average of around £340 million per club. Approximately 35% came from commercial activities, encompassing sponsorship and partnerships alongside merchandise.

Replica shirts therefore represent a relatively small, but far from insignificant, part of clubs’ increasingly diverse revenues. Merchandise income contributes towards wages, transfers and facilities, so reducing prices is not costless. But maximising the price charged for each shirt is not necessarily the same thing as maximising either merchandise revenue or the wider long-term value of the relationship with supporters.

Some clubs have explicitly recognised this trade-off. Brentford, for example, have frozen the prices of adult replica shirts and returned their home shirt to a two-year cycle while continuing to pursue commercial growth elsewhere. It is one example of a club choosing to seek revenue growth without continually increasing what it asks supporters to pay.

And that leaves a question that economics alone cannot answer.

Even if £77 were the profit-maximising price for a football shirt, does that necessarily make it the right price to charge?

Football clubs possess unusual market power precisely because their customers have an unusually strong emotional attachment to them. Clubs can benefit commercially from that loyalty, and supporters clearly accept some premium for wearing their club’s badge.

The economic question is how far clubs can push that advantage before higher prices begin to cost them sales. The moral question is how far they should.

Football supporters may be among the most loyal consumers in the economy. That makes their loyalty commercially valuable. But it should not be mistaken for an unlimited willingness to pay.