german jerseys and manufactured controversy
the athletic succumbs to clickbait journalism
First off, it must be said that I really enjoy the sports website The Athletic. Now a New York Times property, it is just a fantastic entry in that genre. There’s far more analysis and thoughtfulness than, like, Stephen Smith’s and Skip Bayless’s verbal diarrhea. The content isn’t as good now as it was a few years ago. Some of this is related to the NYT’s acquisition—they’ve pivoted in a more overtly left, “woke” direction with their sports coverage. This is fine, in general. People who think we need to keep politics out of sports have little idea about how either politics or sports work. The tilt on The Athletic has just become a little more annoying and hard to ignore.
The article I want to talk about here is a case in point. This came out on July 20th in the aftermath of Euro 2024 as soccer writers were scrambling for something to write about, given the end of the month-long festival of football that is the Euros (and the Copa America), the slower-than-average transfer market, and the fact that the European season doesn’t start for a few weeks. Here’s the title: “How Germany’s pink shirt rose past the culture wars to break barriers and sale records.”
Pink shirt! Culture wars! Barriers broken! Sales records! There is a lot squeezed into that headline.
Now, here’s some context.
Context
Germany wears white in their big games. This is just a thing. National teams and club teams have their preferred colors. Liverpool wears red; Chelsea, blue; Tottenham, white; Manchester City, sky blue. It’s just the way it is. But for two reasons, teams make alternate jerseys (called second and third kits in soccer parlance). The two reasons: 1) if you’re playing another red team, you can’t both be running around the field in red; 2) to sell more jerseys.
And here’s another thing: the second and third kits are famously two things: 1) hit or miss; 2) divisive amongst fans. My club, Tottenham released this as their third kit last year.
It is, to my taste, hideous. What color is that? What does that have to do with the traditional Tottenham lily-white or the alternative navy blue color? It looks like a white kit went into a washing machine with a bunch of other random colors. However, when I went to the local Tottenham supporters’ bar for the first time last fall, guess what I saw a bunch of? Those ugly jerseys. Every time a team releases their new kit designs on social media, at least 2/3 of the comments are disparaging. It is a tough mark to hit for the designers at Nike, Adidas, Puma, etc.
The Article
I hope that serves as sufficient context for why I think this article is just plain silly. Here is how the author, Sebastian Stafford-Bloor, describes the reaction to the kit and its eventual embrace by the German fans: “By the end of the tournament, it would become one of Germany’s fastest-selling football jerseys of all time. Even on the first day, despite a hail of controversy upon its release three months earlier — for reasons nobody was certain of — it appeared to have captured a national mood.” Here’s a picture of the jersey under scrutiny:
What was the source of the controversy? Here’s how Stafford-Bloor describes it:
There were all sorts of grievances. . . The kit was not manly enough. Its colour was not befitting a team of Germany’s standing. The tabloids gnashed their teeth over the absence of the traditional colours and then, on the day of release, Bild, the country’s biggest-selling daily, ran a survey revealing that 48 per cent of respondents thought that the shirt was “completely wrong”, with only 31 per cent approving of it. It was denigrated as “the diversity shirt” and “the Barbie kit”.
Now, I copied and pasted that paragraph out of Bloor’s article. Notice what didn’t come along with it and might lend journalistic credibility to Bloor’s claims? There’s not a single hyperlink in the paragraph. Who is saying these sorts of things? The tabloids? Which ones? Also, isn’t this just what tabloids do: say wild things and rile people up?
Further, as I mentioned above, people always dislike second kits. It’s a soccer tradition. So, for 48% of people to say they were completely wrong does not seem far off the mark. I mean, even announcers spent time last year making fun of Tottenham’s awful third kit during the games. For 1/3 of Tottenham’s fans to like it would be a win. That’s a lot of potential jersey sales, after all.
However, as the article’s title also points out, these jerseys sold remarkably well. People like them and continue to buy them. It became the fastest-selling second kit in German history. That’s pretty cool.
I am responding to this article for two reasons:
I wanted to make what I thought would be an obvious observation: most people are perfectly okay with pink jerseys. Want to know how I know? Also from The Athletic, just a few months ago, here is an article about how the best-selling jersey in the world is Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami jersey. And that jersey’s color is (drumroll). . . pink. You cannot attend a soccer game or go to a soccer field for a kickaround or practice without seeing a bunch of young boys wearing pink Inter Miami jerseys. So, maybe there are still some dudes out there who are like, “Pink’s a girls’ color,” but most people are generally okay with pink.
I hate manufactured controversies. A few people in tabloids who are paid to create hot takes or idiots on an Instagram or X comments section blathering about pink being the “diversity shirt” happens, but they do not represent anything like a consensus. Most people were fine with these jerseys. A lot of people of a lot of different ages and across both genders bought them. This could have been a light story with the following title: “Germany’s Colorful Second Kit Sets Sales Record.” But, because it is the year of our Lord 2024, we cannot even acknowledge a cool, surprising fact—people actually like a second kit!—without layering in some controversies whether those controversies are real or not.
Look, Germany made a gamble and it paid off. Good for them. But to try to extrapolate some major point out of that is foolhardy; on the other hand, to act as if anything other than slavish admiration for the jerseys amounts to some weird, conservative backlash is also silly. People buy jerseys if they like the jersey. It’s a shocking fact, I know. Let’s just let the jersey be a jersey and capitalism be capitalism and social media commenters be confined to their little text boxes and anger. It’s better for everyone that way.