Nowadays the football shirt is one of the most profitable marketing tools of the football industry.

In
five years alone, from 2007 to 2012, Real Madrid, Chelsea, Barcelona and Bayern München sold 30
million shirts (Sportintelligence, 2012). This is just the tip of the iceberg; the total number of shirts in
circulation can only be guessed. It is undeniably true that the football shirt is one of the world’s
bestselling and most soughtafter sport and fashion accessories. Its market, on an upward trend for
years, is still increasing, especially in Asia (cf. Financial Times, 2013; Forbes, 2015). Major labels,
leagues and clubs profit from the fans’ desire to adorn their bodies with their club colours and the
names of their favourite players. Today, expensive player transfers are partly refinanced through
football shirt sales. For PR and marketing, the football shirt is a matter of critical importance (cf.
Gottschal and Schuster, 2007, p. 319). In the everyday iterations of sport and fashion, the football
shirt has become indispensable. Like other sartorial phenomena such as jeans and the t-shirt, it has
become a global uniform. Its special heraldic design unites teams, clubs, fans and spaces on the field
as well as off it. It is known almost everywhere in the world and its symbolism is familiar to everyone.
It serves as an aesthetic and performative mode expressing collective identities (cf. Ranc, 2012, p.
105) and as a visual signifier of football’s importance. The shirt proves that football has progressed to
become an extraordinarily significant cultural figuration (cf. Giulianotti and Finn, 2000; Klein and
Meuser, 2008; Nübel and Fleig, 2011). At first glance only a few clothing items have had such a
homogenising effect and have been accepted so unanimously. Despite its economic and cultural
significance, the taken-forgrantedness of the unassuming football shirt leaves room for further
elucidation of its complex cultural meanings.1 It belongs to a very young product category of
sportswear which first evolved in the nineteenth century in Europe (cf. Mauch, 2005). Its history
started as soon as football became popular. Ever since then it has been a key piece of sports kit, a
corporate uniform and an object which is constantly being redesigned and modified. In the struggle
for football as a cultural figuration, it has become the material embodiment of this process and the
screen onto which symbols of functionality, morality, tradition, modernity, space and identity are
projected. Nowadays the ways of wearing, combining and displaying football kits depends on a
number of other relevant factors such as sex, gender, class, ethnic, religion, politics and authenticity
(cf. Szogs, 2014). So on a second glance one can see that against the backdrop of conformity lies a
constant dynamic or tension between consensus and change (cf. Millward, 2011, p. 61; Ranc, 2012).
An extended treatment of all these topics, particularly with a historical and current perspective, is
not possible in this chapter. I will therefore single out one aspect which I shall analyse: the link
between the football shirt and fan from the perspective of material and cultural studies, which brings
the practice of embodiment into focus. This branch of cultural studies seeks to understand objects,
their materiality and their social use as symbols and platforms for social spaces and social
relationships. It attempts to describe objects produced by humans, including fashion, but most of all
the clothed body, by focusing on past and present processes of cultural formation from the
perspectives of the actors and their material practices. In the course of this process, discourse
analysis, ethnography and action research are employed. These techniques were also used over
three terms in the seminar project at the Department for Cultural Anthropology of Textiles at the
Technical University of Dortmund, whose results form the empirical basis of this chapter. The project
was concerned with the genesis and the meaning of the football shirt in a cultural context. Its results
were exhibited at the football museum BORUSSEUM, which showcases the history of the football
club Borussia Dortmund. For this reason the examples, which take the form of objects and fans’
opinions, and which were mined through participatory observation, non-standardised interviews and
questionnaires, are drawn from this particular club. Based on the project’s findings, my hypothesis is
that the nexus of the football shirt and the fan contributes to, firstly, the cooperative community
building of fans; secondly, to the visualisation of football