“…AND THEY ALL want snoods.”
Do you remember snoods? Over one winter, every English Premier League player seemed to wear snoods during warm ups or on the substitute’s bench.
So when the manager came to me and told me that every player wanted a snood, alongside the training socks, shorts, tracksuits [which had to have skinny fit bottoms!!], kit bags, boot bags, training tee-shirts, training jackets and polo shirts I was already ordering, I just laughed and told him there was loads of scarves in the club shop.
Dealing with kit and kit suppliers can be fun. Browsing through Teamwear kits, picking the jerseys for the following season and wondering how fans will react, breaks the monotony.
But you have to realise the starting position for most League of Ireland clubs is that their business is less welcome than a large schoolboy club.
Over time, a schoolboy club with 350 kids will buy more jerseys, shorts, socks, training tops, windbreakers and polo shirts than an LOI club, even allowing for supporters’ contribution. Also, schoolboy clubs are unlikely to want to get most of it for free because of the ‘exposure’ it will provide the kit supplier.
The lot of LOI clubs has improved slightly with the introduction of the U19 and U17 leagues, so clubs now have to take around 100 sets of gear from kit manufacturers every year or two. With the exception of a few clubs, there isn’t a real retail presence which can drive supporters to buy another 100 jerseys or polos year on year. The scarves and other merchandise you buy on match nights hardly ever comes through a major kit supplier.
Supporters often think that kit suppliers should fight for the rights to produce kits for LOI clubs. That’s not the case though due to a history of unpaid bills and overestimating the retail portion to justify getting a bit of free kit. In the end, a lot of people supplying smaller League of Ireland clubs are doing it as a favour in the hope that local schoolboy clubs will like the LOI club’s gear and will be more likely to take a sales call from the local agent. It was something that worked particularly well for Hummel when they provided kit to Cork City and Derry City; the knock-on effect to their sales among local schoolboy clubs was significant.
Because of the typically low levels of sales, the vast majority of LOI kit comes direct from teamwear catalogues, offering the same choice that any junior club in the country has unless you can convince your supplier to hold off on that design and keep it exclusively for you.
Even then, if different suppliers provide gear from the same manufacturer you can end up with the same jersey as Bray and Cork City discovered last season. Both went with Nike as a manufacturer, but through different suppliers, and ended up with identical kit.
The only way to get away from teamwear ranges is to do a ‘bespoke’ kit where you convince the manufacturer to design a kit from scratch, just for you, and it’s here that the real figures about LOI merchandise sales hit home.
While it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, if you can commit to purchasing 250 kits over a two-year period from a manufacturer, typically you can request a bespoke kit. The lead time tends to be greater and it can be a little more expensive, but it’s within every club to order whatever they desire if they can hit 250 jersey sales over a two-year period, including the 100 jerseys they’d take for their own teams.
The fact is that most LOI clubs can’t commit to taking 150 jerseys in stock that they might never sell to supporters. While there are clubs in the league that might even hit six-figure sums in merchandise revenue, many don’t get near 150 jerseys, or €7,500.
As I wrote last year, it’s time for clubs to come together and see if a single kit supplier servicing the whole league [as with the MLS and Adidas] might not be the best way forward.
Collectively the 20 league clubs should be able to commit to 2-3,000 jerseys and additional kit, which would make it worth the time of all manufacturers.
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