The global life of the football shirt: a critical agenda

Football shirts are often treated as accessories to the global game, yet they function as dense social objects through which meanings, values, and relations circulate. Inspired by doing research with organizations serving forced migrants, I discuss the importance of the football shirt and its intricate connection with commercialization, well-being, and social change on the global stage. In doing so, I propose a critical agenda for football shirt studies, that positions the shirt as a tool through which we can investigate, address, and shape issues related to the global game. The paper first mobilizes Appadurai’s idea on the social life of things, to conceptualize football shirts as mobile commodities whose value is continually produced through exchange and interpretation. Building from this framework, I map two interconnected research strands. First, a marketing strand, which requires qualitative, consumer-culture-informed work on how marketers, sponsors, and diverse global fans co-construct shirt value. Second, a sociological strand that foregrounds the role of the shirt towards identity, cross-cultural, and socio-ecological “wicked problems”. Overall, the paper argues that football shirts are socialized commodities whose politics of value have concrete implications for sport organizations. By signposting key questions and emphasizing interdependence across disciplines, I provide a pragmatic roadmap for research and practice aimed at socially purposeful engagements with the football shirt.