Inside the underground world of fake football shirts

Ever bought a fake football shirt? If the answer is yes, you’re not alone.

The Athletic surveyed nearly 300 fans across all 20 Premier League teams, in person and via social media, this season and 52 per cent admitted to knowingly purchasing one. Of those, more than 80 per cent said they would do it again. Why? Because the real thing costs so much more money.

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Official football shirts of Premier League clubs can set you back £85 ($107) each — or up to £125 if you want a higher-spec players’ version — before customisation. Fakes, however, are as low as £8.

Premier League fans spent more than £180million buying the latter last season — a third of the genuine market (£489m). Online searches for fakes rose by 518 per cent between 2021 and 2024 as an estimated 16.2m shirts were produced per year, according to analysts Corsearch.

“Myself and a lot of my friends do it because we just can’t justify £80 to £120 on a football shirt, when you can get 10 of them for the same price,” says TikTok influencer Peasy. “They don’t feel great about it and have to push what you know is probably wrong to one side, because of how inaccessible football shirts can be now. It’s extortionate.”

It is not illegal in the UK to buy a fake football shirt for personal use, but do you know what you’re really buying when you barter for a kit on holiday, think you’ve found a bargain online or pick up a cheap top in the local market? And where does your money go afterwards?

A nine-month investigation by The Athletic has taken us inside the fake football shirt industry; from a police raid in north London to Malta, where officials try to intercept large shipments from Asia, and also online, where apparently counterfeit goods are sold in plain sight.

“Buying that fake is far from a victimless crime,” says Dr Ulrika Bonnier, an international expert on corruption, illicit trade and human trafficking.

“Wearing that product, you were actually poisoning yourself,” says Steve Lamar, president and CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA). “Dupes (as they’re known in the U.S.) are not cool. You’re buying product-safety violations and pollution of the environment. You can’t be a good steward of the economy, environment and planet and wear counterfeits. Those are contradictory ideas.”

The Premier League told The Athletic it takes the issue “extremely seriously” to try to protect supporters from fakes. The league’s anti-counterfeiting programme helped seize 400,000 fakes worth £28milllion last season and removed 180,000 online listings worth another £4m.

North of Manchester United’s Old Trafford and neighbours City’s Etihad Stadium is Cheetham Hill, a district which once had the unfortunate moniker of counterfeit capital of Europe. The Athletic toured the area with Chief Inspector Andrew Torkington of Greater Manchester Police in October, starting on Bury New Road, which was known as ‘Counterfeit Street’.

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“There would be hundreds and thousands of people on the street corners with spotters to identify the police and get you into the premises for counterfeit products,” he says, before pointing to a property and adding: “We had a huge counterfeit football kit seizure within this premises.

“You’d go in, there would be wires hanging down, it would be dark, no windows, the shutter comes down behind you. Heaven forbid there’s a fire, you’re going to struggle to get out.

Police seized fake shirts like these in Manchester’s Cheetham Hill (Adam Leventhal/The Athletic)

“You really did take your chance. If you were a female or a child, there were a lot of sexual assaults.”

What happened if the police turned up when customers were inside? “The doors would be shut, knife to the throat: ‘Keep quiet, don’t say a word’,” Torkington says.

He estimates shops were making “£30,000 to £40,000 per week in cash” and adds: “That money was going back into serious and violent crime.”

Operation Vulcan began in 2022, as an ambitious three-year plan to clean up the area. More than 1,100 tonnes of counterfeit items from more than 200 shops were seized, with an estimated value of over £130million, according to police. The largest haul — including thousands of fake Premier League football shirts — saw raids on 200 shipping containers, with over 500 tonnes of counterfeit products, worth £87m.

Operation Vulcan (Greater Manchester Police)

But as one fake shirt hotspot closes down, another one tends to open up.

Following the Cheetham Hill clean-up, fake football shirt sales have increased in the tourist hotspot of Camden, north London, and are clearly visible in a vast number of shops there.

Police carry out regular raids. In January, for example, 3,500 fake shirts worth approximately £1.5million were found in two properties. One of these included secret doors, which revealed a large amount of hidden stock.

When The Athletic visited a recently-raided shop as part of our investigation, it was back in business, selling counterfeit jerseys once again.

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Camden is part of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency. The local council told The Athletic: “We’re committed to working with the police and our partners to protect the public from poor quality or unsafe goods sold in the borough. We will continue to drive this work forward and make Camden a safer place for all.”

In June last year, The Athletic accompanied City of London police on a raid of a residential property in Enfield, on the northern outskirts of London.

Counterfeit shirts of many major teams — having been shipped from China — that were packaged up and ready to send out to customers were discovered in the bedroom of a home and in a car. Stock worth approximately £13,700 was also held in a storage unit.

In the UK, punishment for trademark infringement can be up to 10 years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both. In the United States, sentences can range between three to five years and up to a fine of $250,000 (£197,000).

The individual in Enfield received a caution and was ordered to take down his sales platform on Facebook Marketplace.

Fake shirts were found in north London (Adam Leventhal/The Athletic)

Staged during the 2024 European Championship, the operation — a collaboration between the IPO (Intellectual Property Office), Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) and Border Force — led to eight arrests and the seizure of what police said were £450,000 ($570,000) worth of fake football shirts in north London.

“It used to be hidden — like, ‘Oh, God, you buy things off Chinese websites?’. You didn’t want to openly admit it,” says Peasy. “Now, because of the pricing, people just aren’t bothered anymore. If you’ve gone out and ordered your football kit and you’ve paid £12 for it, own it.”

The U.S. government ranks China as the most notorious counterfeit market, providing 90 per cent of fake goods seized at U.S. borders. The IPO says the UK’s economy loses £9billion ($11.4bn) a year because of counterfeiting and piracy, costing 80,000 jobs.

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Fake football shirts made in China are sold in-person and online. In April last year, Chinese authorities raided Pandabuy’s head office in Hangzhou and seized millions of dollars worth of counterfeit stock, including shirts, which law-enforcement officers said was enough “to fill 20 football stadiums”.

One person working in the industry — who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorised to speak publicly — estimates that on any given day, one factory can produce 20,000 to 50,000 shirts. One worker — who would oversee the production of 1,000 shirts in that period — would earn £15 to 30 per day.

Chinese e-commerce app Pinduoduo appears to be one of the busiest platforms for fake shirt sales. It’s on a U.S. government watch list — the annual review of ‘Notorious markets of counterfeiting and piracy’ — because it “continues to offer a high volume of counterfeit goods” and shows an “unwillingness to engage with brand owners to resolve issues or develop improved processes”.

Pinduoduo insists it “has made significant investments in technology and resources to combat bad actors engaged in IP (intellectual property) violations. We continue to strengthen our processes and work with rights holders to protect their IP”.

AliExpress was flagged on the ‘notorious markets’ list in 2022 and apparently counterfeit goods are available to buy on its website.

The Chinese platform, though, was an official partner of European football’s governing body, UEFA, for Euro 2024 last summer. UEFA declined to comment on the suitability of the partnership.

“AliExpress is committed to protecting IP rights and prohibits merchants from listing items that infringe upon the IP rights of third parties,” the platform told The Athletic. “We have measures in place to combat counterfeit listings.”

Influencers who have relationships with Chinese platforms are also a big part of the fake shirt industry.

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One TikTok reviewer revealed in a social media message he receives up to eight per cent commission from DHGate — which has a cult following among fake shirt enthusiasts — when sharing links. The platform declined to comment when contacted by The Athletic.

Influencers also push followers towards spreadsheets containing hundreds of links to counterfeit products — often called ‘reps’ or ‘1:1’ — and receive payment from the retailer, or the social media platform’s marketplace.

The Mediterranean island nation of Malta is one of Europe’s smallest countries but it aims to play a big part in combatting the global movement of counterfeit football gear.

Shredded football shirts in Malta (Adam Leventhal/The Athletic)

Its strategic position between Europe and North Africa comes with a deep sea port, allowing huge ships — often carrying 30,000 shipping containers — to dock on journeys around the world.

The Athletic was given behind-the-scenes access to Malta’s free port operation, and witnessed what happened following the seizure of a suspicious Chinese container last year. It held what inspectors said were 50,000 counterfeit football shirts destined for Europe, 25,000 of which were shredded. Another 25,000 fake Adidas tops were retained, owing to ongoing legal proceedings.

Couldn’t they have been given away to charities?

“Not at all,” says Randolph Mizzi, one of the senior inspectors. “We don’t know what materials they’re using. So no quality control to avoid skin rashes or infections. Also, it might not be fireproof.

“(The products) might be supporting terrorism, child labour, weapons of mass destruction, human trafficking or drugs. I enjoy seeing them shredded.”

There is also the question of where your money goes when you buy a fake football shirt online.

“There’s a lot of scamming,” explains Elke Biechele, chief executive of Risiko Tech, a Singapore-based company that investigates financial crime. “It’s very serious if you engage with these kinds of people, because you don’t know how they will use your data.

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“One scam is you are asked to use or download the (counterfeit) sellers’ payment app. Then they have all the details, because it’s their app, server, passwords and access to bank accounts.

“The next sort of crime is they clean out the whole bank account. It happened in Singapore. Someone bought a T-shirt. Criminals had their bank details and immediately cleaned out all their savings. They took loans — because taking loans online is easy — and they maxed out credit cards within a day.”

Dr Bonnier, from the Transnational Alliance to Combat Illegal Trade (TRACIT), also warns buyers to think twice before purchasing a fake football shirt.

“Given the illegal nature of counterfeiting, everything that happens is outside of the normal controls and oversight that a labour force would normally have,” she says, “which makes those workers very vulnerable to abuse. You might have everything from migrants smuggled into a country, coerced into selling these counterfeit goods and children used and abused.

“In pursuit of profits, they cut corners at the expense of men, women and children: child labour, forced labour, human trafficking, long hours, dangerous working conditions, passports being confiscated, unlawfully low wages — or no payment at all.”

The issue here is the counterfeit shirts industry is completely unregulated, so you do not know how the item you’ve bought was made or indeed what materials it consists of.

“Authentic products go through a lot of testing, compliance and evaluation. None of that happens in the making of an inauthentic product,” explains Lamar of the AAFA, which found “unacceptably and poisonous levels of heavy metals, like arsenic, cadmium and lead” in a 2022 study of counterfeit T-shirts.

“There’s a perfect storm in the football world at the moment, where everybody wants the latest shirts, there are too many of them, they’re too expensive and the quality of counterfeits has improved,” says former Puma and Umbro designer Rob Warner. “It’s got its own sub-culture. I can see why the environment has been created for that to flourish, but it’s not a good thing.”

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Clubs need to make money, kit manufacturers need to recoup the millions they pay for Premier League partnerships and the cost of a shirt is more than just the material.

This is an approximate breakdown of an authentic shirt’s £85 price: £10 for manufacture, £5 for marketing and shipping, £25 each to the manufacturer and retailer, £5 is licensing and £15 for 20 per cent VAT (value added tax) in the UK.

Shirts on sale in Qatar, the 2022 men’s World Cup host nation, in 2023 (Matthew Ashton/AMA/Getty Images)

Warner still comes down on the side of the fan: “It’s getting increasingly hard to justify the cost of the shirts on behalf of the industry that I’ve spent my career in.”

Is part of the answer, then, limiting the prices of official Premier League shirts?

The Athletic asked all 20 of the division’s clubs whether they would consider a cap on the cost of these tops. Fourteen clubs would need to agree for any such rule to be implemented. Only two clubs responded, while four — Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United and Leicester City — offered no comment.

Ipswich Town said: “We’re one of the cheapest shirts in the Premier League (£59). We review our pricing annually and always aim to keep our shirt as affordable as possible.”

Brentford, meanwhile, recently used some of their kits for more than one season “to offer greater affordability and focus on sustainability”.

The Athletic put the results of its fake football shirt survey to the seven Premier League kit manufacturers (Adidas, Puma, Nike, Umbro, Macron, SUDU and Castore) but only three responded.

“The findings do not surprise me and the very reason we brought SUDU into the UK football market was to fix what we view to be a broken model where fans are mainly given a choice between paying excessive prices for official products, buying counterfeit goods or not buying at all,” says Vinny Clark, chief executive of Levy Merchandising, the company behind Wolves’ supplier SUDU.

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Adidas — kit supplier to a league-high seven clubs — says pricing is “reflective of the level of sustainability and performance innovation that brings them to life” and that its shirts are “designed and produced to be worn proudly by fans for years to come”. It “rigorously protects and enforces its IP rights against counterfeiters as their actions tarnish the reputation of our brand”.

Puma takes “decisive action against fakes” to “ensure our market share” by working with global law enforcement “to seek out violations”. It added: “Alarmingly, more and more consumers today are willing to purchase counterfeit products, further fuelling the illicit trade” and that’s “particularly concerning because it helps infringers — often backed by organised crime — strengthen their market presence and share”.

(Photos: Adam Leventhal/The Athletic; Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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