What’s your favourite AC Milan shirt, do you reckon?

One of those 80s Kappa classics maybe? Skinny stripes, photocopier brand for a sponsor, star instead of a badge type-deals? How about that adidas big collar, cheap car brand on the chest number worn by George Weah? Something from the PUMA Fly Emirates vintage, perhaps? There’s a lot to choose from. My favourite is from 1992 and it has a collage of Franco Baresi on the front. Surrounded by smoky images of the Curva Nord, Milan’s No.6 stands resplendent under a banner that reads “La Fantasia Del Calcio Siamo Noi”, which translates to “We Are The Fantasy of Football”. The shirt I’m talking about is a bootleg.

A bootleg is a unique, fan-made design made for a specific player or team. In the words of Josh Steeples, founder of A Store Like 94 and all-round bootleg expert: “they’re fake football shirts that are so fake you know it’s a fake.” They are different from straight unofficial replicas too, in that they aren’t trying to replicate any existing design. Bootleggers are making something new and magical.

I read the ‘We’ on that banner above Baresi on two different levels. Firstly, it’s the passionate Milanese declaring their team’s superiority to the world. They were dominant domestically in a season where they narrowly missed out on a league-European Cup double. The other ‘we’ comes from a different, specific Milan fan: from the person that designed this chaotic, garish, beautiful bootleg jersey. They’re saying “it’s us - the fans - that make football a fantasy. We are the ones that elevate this game into dreamland”.

The golden era of bootlegs came during the 90s, a time of great upheaval in the football world. New broadcasting platforms identified the global potential of the beautiful game and fought tooth and nail for the rights to profit from it. In 1992, Rupert Murdoch’s newly-formed Sky paid over £300m to exhibit the shiny new Premier League. A year later, RAI paid $67.5m a year for the rights to the Italian Serie A. This boom in football on the telly coincided with a surge in ticket prices, with the cost of a first division ticket in England rising 312% across the decade. Long-term fans were priced out of supporting their teams and fought to reclaim ownership of the game they saw slipping away from them. One such attempt was the bootleg shirt.

Bootleg shirts are representative of the thing that makes football special: its accessibility. No other sport has the universal appeal of the beautiful game because of how easy it is to join the party: anyone can join in, all you need is a ball. Bootlegs feed on the same energy. Anyone can make one, all you need is an idea. When the football fans of the 1990s saw their game becoming increasingly commercialised, they responded with technicolour creativity. The bootleg became a sign of a real fan with real love for the game.

Today, football shirts are a booming market. From humble origins producing replicas for kids in the 1970s, kit manufacturers have grown the sale of shirts into a monstrous global operation. In 2022, Manchester United sold over 2.5m shirts worldwide, raking in over £100m in revenue. The year before, Nike agreed to pay Liverpool £150m over five years for the privilege of manufacturing their jerseys. Vintage giant Classic Football Shirts have grown from a bedroom operation into a £10m company off the back of people’s obsession with wearable football heritage.

The issue is, because the demand for shirts is at an all time high, clubs, manufacturers and retailers can bump up prices whenever they want. In 2008, an adult-sized England shirt would set you back £40. Now, the equivalent Stadium jersey retails for just under £75. Not only have the prices gone up, but the number of shirts too. Big clubs regularly put out four jerseys a season - home, away, third and a special one-off celebrating an anniversary or collab - as well as a handful of corresponding keeper shirts. Napoli, Italy’s champions-elect, have no fewer than six shirts available on their website, including a lipstick stained Valentine’s special and a Christmas shirt that features a cartoon reindeer. Football fans are once again seeing the economics of the game they love shifting. Today, more than ever before, they feel treated like customers, like consumers of a product instead of supporters of a team. It’s time for fans to reclaim a small corner of the game. It’s time for the second bootleg boom.

“Fans are becoming more and more disconnected from football”, Josh says, “Clubs are run as businesses. Bootlegs are a great way to reclaim the game for ourselves.”

There is a long history of DIY fashion in football. Look at images from any early 20th Century cup final and you’ll see supporters cheerily showing off their hand-made hats, scarves, jumpers, and rosettes. Slogans are painstakingly stitched in-between hand-pressed pin badges, supporters’ commitment to their team etched in wool and enamel.

In Germany, you can spot long-term fans by their kutte, denim vests adorned with home-made patches - the number of sew-ons reflective of years spent on the terraces. Bootleg shirts are the pop culture evolution of a decades long tradition.

Not only do bootlegs symbolise an act of resistance against the business of football, they look sick too. In a world of minutely designed, multi-piece club lifestyle collections that require 1,000 levels of corporate sign off, there is value in the open, clear, spontaneous vision of a single football fan. Their love for their club is distilled down into one singular item of clothing, into an honest representation of what it feels like to support that particular team. There is a creative power in being ignorant of brand guidelines that restrict the design teams of official merch. Badges get stretched, images get warped and colour palettes are transposed into an acid reality that makes for the brilliant and the surreal. It’s the energy of the maximalist, Moschino-wearing, Garage head made for a 3pm kick-off.

Now is the time for football fans to reclaim the space on their backs. Makers like Josh, Good Spirit, Retro Football Gang and Cult Kits, as well as projects like Émile-Samory Fofana’s ‘Champions League Koulikoro’ have already started the charge. They champion the weird universe of bootlegs and the people that wear them. In a hyper-commercialised world, they are fighting to retain ownership of the game they love, one nostalgia-dipped crewneck at a time. They are the fantasy of football. They make the game a dreamland.

Bootleg football shirts are the best football shirts. You can keep your high-tech “Stadium Issue” 4th kits. Forget your niche vintage Bundesliga long sleeves. I want cheap, amateur, lurid polyester designed in someone’s garage. I want football shirts made with love.