Football fans have been paying tens of thousands of pounds for shirts worn by footballers at iconic moments and Scotland star Scott McTominay’s name is one to take pride of place
If someone asked you to name which current footballers’ shirts have sold for tens of thousands of pounds, you’d probably name the obvious stars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.
You might not have Scott McTominay quite as high on your list, but football is full of surprises.
This wasn’t McTominay’s shirt from Scotland’s dramatic World Cup qualifying victory over Denmark, though you’d expect that to fetch a tidy sum for any fan able to get their hands on it. Rather, it’s from May this year, when the midfielder scored the opener for Napoli in a 2-0 victory over Cagliari which handed them the Serie A title.
In the aftermath of the match, McTominay’s shirt was signed by the player and auctioned off by MatchWornShirt, a company which partners with club and national sides to give fans a chance to buy a piece of history. A football shirt is only worth what a fan will pay for it, and in this instance the figure in question was more than €24,000 (£21,164).
“You’ve got two reasons to collect, right?” MatchWornShirt head of business development James Flude tells Mirror Football at the company’s Amsterdam office. “The big names will always sell. So Ronaldo is always going to sell whether he barely even touches the ball or whether he scores a hat trick and wins the World Cup – he will always sell for eye watering sums of money. The other part of it is like moment-based and people investing because something special happens in that game.”
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He also points to Christoph Baumgartner’s shirt from a match between Austria and Slovakia when the midfielder’s goal after just six seconds was the fastest in international football history. “While the game was still going on, his shirt was up €4,000 or something ridiculous, because people can interact with that moment,” he says.
“It sounds a bit of a marketing cliche, but that’s what we sell, right? We sell the moments as well as with the shirts, as the bit that goes alongside it.” Baumgartner’s shirt, if you were wondering, eventually fetched €18,000.
Flude is a collector of football shirts himself – as a Chelsea fan, the majority of his collection relates to the London club and he says his collection began when he received a signed Salomon Kalou shirt during the Ivorian’s time at Stamford Bridge. When he was a teenager, would regularly head down to the front of the stands as full-time neared, hoping a player might throw a shirt his way, and the pain of one near miss made him even more determined.
“Wherever I was sat in the away end, I would know that if the result was a positive one, nine times out of 10, the players would come over to the fans at the end,” he says. “So I’d got into the habit of wherever I was about 87, 88 minutes, I would go down to the front, so at least if the shirts did come in, I’d be there or thereabouts to forget in one.
“And so I remember I got my hand to Michael Ballack’s shirt, I got a proper hand to Michael Ballack’s, and I’m pretty sure that he was throwing it to me, but who knows? We’ll never know. But I didn’t get it. So some massive geezer in the away end ripped it off me and I was absolutely gutted.”
Flude still has a significant collection, though has yet to pay the huge five-figure sums which some other shirts have fetched. At the time of writing, the record stands at £54,369 – the sum paid by a bidder in South Korea for the shirt Cristiano Ronaldo wore in Portugal’s draw with Hungary in October.
Three of Ronaldo’s shirts feature in the current top 10, along with four worn by Lionel Messi. The remainder belong to Paris Saint-Germain star Marquinhos, whose 2025 Champions League final shirt sold for £48,119, former Tottenham captain Son Heung-min and Marquinhos’ PSG team-mate Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.
MatchWornShirt only deal with first-half shirts, so as not to deny players the chance for emotional shirt-swap moments at the final whistle. A short drive away from the office, in the city of Zaandam, sits a warehouse full of these shirts – and it smells exactly how you’d expect.
In the middle of the building sits a pair of lockers which we’re told are used to remove player DNA from shirts without washing them – allegedly after a request from one club which we won’t name here – with sweat, dirt and grass stains all evidence of authenticity and essentially non-negotiables. And if you thought football shirts got dirty or sweaty over the course of a game, they’ve got nothing on rugby or cycling gear.
The question I’m sure some of you are wondering is who buys these shirts? Who is ready to drop tens of thousands of pounds on a player-worn kit, sometimes from a game they didn’t even attend themselves?
According to Flude, it’s a mix of fans and financial speculators, with some buying keepsakes for themselves or their nearest and dearest and others preparing to sell on for profit. “People are seeing the values that are going to these shirts and to these moments, to these items, and people want a piece of it,” he says.
“So you’re getting an increasing amount of sort of financial investors in addition to what I would call emotional investors, people like me, that just collect because they want that memory of the shirt, the feeling, the occasion. And I think that both of them genuinely are interesting to me on both a personal and professional level.
“Because obviously we want to sell the biggest products, the best items, the real talking points, but I’m also just as excited by the person that might go to a Fulham game and it might be their kid’s 18th birthday and they want to get a Harry Wilson shirt because it’s something that means something to them. Because that’s basically the thing that we sell. It’s the emotional connection. And yeah, there’s the financial side of it as well. But I’m just as interested in people’s emotional investments as their financial ones.”
With the top 10 shirts each selling for between £35,000 and £55,000, there’s a chance the record will be broken again before too long – especially with a World Cup on the horizon. MatchWornShirt had deals with more than half of the teams competing at Euro 2024 and are expecting to have more than half of the 48 national sides in North America next summer.
“I would love to have every single team at the World Cup in our portfolio, realistically, we won’t, but… it will be somewhere between 50 and 100 percent and the closer you get to that 100 percent, the more likely we are to have those real big occasion moments,” Flude adds.
“And that’s what we want. We want to have World Cup final shirts on our platform next summer. Fingers crossed, they’ll be England ones, but that’s not let’s not get bogged down in detail.”
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