Right, I’d been meaning to set up a blog detailing my quite ridiculous collection of international football shirts for ages, but owing to a combination of time constraints, technological shortcomings and downright laziness I struggled to get around to it before finally, belatedly taking the plunge in 2016.
First, a bit of background: My name is Kris. I’m a Charlton Athletic supporter from Milton Keynes in merry old England. From as far back as I care to remember two of may favourite things have been football and geography. In 1990, at the easily excitable age of eight, I discovered the FIFA World Cup, which seamlessly blended the two together and thus I became hooked on the international game.
Being English with an Irish mother, my first rash of national shirts always sported either three lions or a shamrock, but then, on a family holiday to Mallorca in 1993, I was seduced by the bright orange hues of a cheap (and quite obviously fake) Netherlands top featuring Ronald Koeman’s name on the back. Despite it’s inherent naffness I found myself wearing this shirt all the time, which proved somewhat problematic a few months later when the dastardly Dutchman snuffed out England’s World Cup 94 aspirations via some grade A shenanigans in Rotterdam. Subsequently my garish knockoff was consigned to the back of my cupboard to keep my WWF action figures company. However I’d enjoyed the feeling of donning something foreign and (vaguely) exotic and so a more legitimate collection began in earnest.
Over the next ten years or so I snapped up international shirts where money allowed, and by the time I started university in 2004 I’d accumulated around 20-25 different countries. By this point I had the tentative notion that I’d acquire a shirt from every nation to have played at the World Cup finals and after allowing the internet and eBay into my life this target seemed all the more feasible. At the time one of my classmates, having noticed that I’d often stroll into lecture resplendent in the colours of countries as diverse as Greece, Mexico and Morocco, enquired as to whether I had a shirt, or was trying to acquire a shirt from every FIFA member.
Initially I considered this idea highly fanciful, and more likely downright impossible. That is until a few years later when I stumbled upon the blog of a certain Mr Nick Warrick, a fellow national shirt enthusiast from Peterborough who was indeed trying to collect an official shirt from every footballing nation in the world. Further online investigations yielded several other collectors attempting much the same thing. Having initiated contact with this -quite possibly deranged – community, my personal collection ballooned, finally racing a conclusion of sorts in 2018 when a beautiful Belize shirt (acquired through an ebay seller in Mexico) popped its way through my letterbox, thus fulfilling my 211 FIFA members quota.
I’m well aware, incidentally, that a few of these shirts are not 100% official -See my blog on the Central African Republic where I’ve laid out my position on what is ultimately a very grey area. I am still on the lookout for replacements in such instances, but if none are forthcoming, or indeed financially viable, then I don’t feel the odd dubious shirt necessarily undermines the collection in any way.