This feature appears in FLOOD 13: The Tenth Anniversary Issue. You can purchase this deluxe, 252-page commemorative edition—a collectible, coffee-table-style volume in a 12" x 12" format—featuring Gorillaz, Magdalena Bay, Mac DeMarco, Lord Huron, Bootsy Collins, Wolf Alice, and much more here or at Barnes & Noble stores across the US.
When it comes to soccer—or “football,” as it’s known outside of the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—nothing represents a team better than the kit that they wear on the field. Emblazoned with their crest and colors, the most successful clubs sport instantly identifiable pieces of iconography that allow you to identify them in a heartbeat. Sky blue? That’s Manchester City. Yellow and green? Brazil. Dark blue and garnet? Has to be Barcelona. Each club is unique and every kit tells a different story. And we’re currently seeing more of them worn in public than ever, sometimes regardless of personal allegiance.
Musicians are getting in on the trend, too. You may have noticed over the past few years that there’s been an increasing number of artist and soccer crossovers, with merchandisers such as Icarus Football, Killa Villa, and Full Kit working with artists including Anderson .Paak, Fred again.., and even Spice Girls to bring conceptual soccer jerseys to life, aiming to capture either the essence of their artistry or of a particular record.
For Full Kit co-founder Robbie Laing, there was a clear gap in the market for high-quality music and soccer shirts. “I felt like the merch offerings in terms of football kits weren’t very good,” he says. “Companies would make a T-shirt with a screen print in the placements of a kit and it would be a piece of crap or not true to the sport.” Such was the quality that Full Kit produced, it soon went from a project that made one-off bootlegs to having star names in music wanting to collaborate. “It was a creative project to show what we thought football shirts should be for musicians,” says Laing. “Before long, the first big artist we got hit up by was Calvin Harris and we made a shirt to celebrate the release of a track called ‘Miracle.’” Since then, Full Kit haven’t looked back, supplying shirts for artists including Oneothrix Point Never, Miso Extra, Romy, and Future Islands, to name a few. This month, in preparation for World Cup, Full Kit also announced a partnership with 4AD on a new capsule collection featuring merch inspired by classic albums from Cocteau Twins, Scott Walker, Air Miami, and Colourbox.
The market for vintage soccer shirts is booming, and there’s even been increased demand in the US. For example, the UK brand Classic Football Shirts—which offers thousands of football styles from the present day all the way back to the 1970s—has opened stores in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. In an interview with NBC Sports, CFS founder Doug Bierton suggested that the US market is catching up with the trend which started in the UK a few years ago. “You are transitioning from aficionado collectors into more mainstream fashion, [greater] general awareness of football and people, even if they’re not an expert in it, just want an old shirt now.”
photo by Raphaël Gaultier
“It’s the balance of wanting to reference something old with something new.” — Kai Campos of Mount Eerie
When it comes to crafting a template for a Full Kit collaboration, vintage shirts often lay the foundation, focusing on some of the sport’s most iconic, eye-catching, and instantly identifiable designs. One example is their collaboration with Mount Kimbie to celebrate the release of their 2024 album The Sunset Violent. Taking the striking orange and white stripes associated with a classic kit from Netherlands club Philips Sport Vereniging (a.k.a. PSV), the badge features the album abbreviation “TSV.”
For the group’s Kai Campos, the shirt had come to represent one of his earliest idols. “When I was getting into football properly, I really remember my memories of Ronaldo.” Having admired the Brazilian’s performances for Barcelona, the band ended up paying homage to his European beginnings at PSV, where he scored 54 goals in 58 matches. Campos believes that the shirt represents a melding of the past and the present. “One of the themes of the record is trying to quite heavily reference my influences, and at the same time not trying to be straight-up pastiche. It’s the balance of wanting to reference something old with something new.” And it’s that same balance which is represented on the TSV shirt.
photo by Robbie Laing
“Sometimes I feel people rep the artists they support almost like a team in some ways. People like to wear artist merchandise as a badge of honor.” — Robbie Laing, co-founder of Full Kit
photo by Robbie Laing
photo by Robbie Laing
For each Full Kit collaboration, the brand works closely with the artists to create a piece that truly represents them. “We look for older eras,” says Laing. “Color is always a big part of it, matching with the themes or ethos of the record. We often play with existing assets from the artists because we want it to speak for itself. For a specific record we’d go into what the core themes are, and we’d dive into [the artist] as a person to understand what their interests and background is.” He references Kelly Lee Owens as an example of the close creative process. “That one was awesome—we made a number of designs for the crest based on different elements related to her Welsh background.”
Another artist who Full Kit have worked with is Future Islands, whose singer Samuel T. Herring is a passionate Everton fan. The band released two kits, one being based off of a classic Napoli design, immediately bringing to mind images of Diego Maradona, but it has a double-meaning for Herring. “The color is not quite a Carolina blue, but does speak to the State of North Carolina where the band came from.” he says. That same shade of blue is what Herring wore playing soccer in his youth, and was one of the main draws toward his love of Everton in the first place.
“I really started to notice when rappers started referencing footballers. In my youth, rappers would talk about basketball players.” — Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands
The band’s other collaboration with Full Kit has the red and black stripes of AC Milan, but it’s actually a ruse. “The second kit is a trick,” says Herring. “It’s actually an Everton kit from the ’90s. My hope was some Liverpool fan would be tricked into wearing an Everton kit, and that would make me laugh.” The Future Island shirts are an example of how these kits not only come to represent an artist’s iconography, but also their own story with soccer and fandom for the teams they support.
There’s no doubt that wearing soccer jerseys has increasingly become a fashion statement over the past couple of years. Even Balenciaga, Stella McCartney, and Armani have released their own versions. This has partly been attributed to the “Blokecore” trend, which sees shirts paired with baggy or straight-cut jeans and Adidas trainers. And it’s surely only increased with the recent wave of ’90s nostalgia that’s been exacerbated by the return of some of the decade’s most important bands, including Blur and Oasis.
But the growth of the women’s game, and celebrities such as Dua Lipa repping soccer shirts, also means that the trend is much less male-dominated than soccer-related fashion was in the ’90s. And while shirts are increasingly a desirable fashion choice for aesthetic reasons, the growing popularity of soccer—especially the Premier League in the US—means that more fans are looking for shirts to express their loyalty. Artist and soccer collaborations play on this devotion by attributing the same sense of loyalty to musicians. “Sometimes I feel people rep the artists they support almost like a team in some ways,” Laing says. “People like to wear artist merchandise as a badge of honor.”
And, as Herring notes, youth culture has played a huge part in the increasing popularity of soccer. “The game is growing rapidly and that’s coming up from the youth. I really started to notice when rappers started referencing footballers. In my youth, rappers would talk about basketball players.” The UK’s rap and grime scenes have always had a close relationship with soccer, but name drops by artists such as Drake, Travis Scott, and Ty Dolla $ign show its increasing appeal in the US.
photo by Kimberley Ross
Sometimes, that badge of honor stretches a little further, too. If you’ve been to any festivals this summer, chances are that you’ve seen the Fontaines D.C x Bohemians FC shirt. While paying homage to their 2024 album Romance, 30 percent of all the proceeds also go to Medical Aid for Palestinians, making it a shirt that means a little bit more than the typical collaboration. “It’s more than making a football kit for musicians,” says Laing. “It has layers of storytelling: it provides aid to Palestine, it’s tied to a band that is super hot, and there’s also the hometown feel. There are plenty of cash grabs because people follow trends, but I’m happy to see those everywhere. They’ve done it the right way.”
Music and soccer collaborations are nothing new; artists have always aligned themselves with their teams as any fan would. What merchandise companies such as Full Kit are offering fans is an opportunity to represent their favorite artists in a much more personal way in the form of soccer shirts. It’s a declaration of fandom, an identifier of taste that people can connect over. With the World Cup heading to North America in 2026, the rise of the soccer shirt fashion trend is only likely to keep on rising as the sport increasingly enters the mainstream consciousness. FL
