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Signed Shirt
May 2012 For a footie fan, football shirts never go out of fashion. You’ve got to represent your team loyalty with the latest kit – the newest away shirt, the most recent home jersey, even training tops and sideline sweaters. There’s one way, though, of denoting your affiliation with eleven sweaty men and their weekly prowess that really stands out from the crowd – even if you’d have to be a striker short of a side to actually wear it. We’re talking about a signed shirt: the ultimate footie souvenir, no matter who you are or where your loyalties lie.
Not many people will be crazy enough to actually don a jersey signed by one or more of their heroes. Really, what you want to do is protect the thing in a frame – that way temptation can never get the better either of you or anyone else in the house. It certainly would be appealing to score the winning goal in your weekly Astroturf special whilst wearing a shirt signed by the immortal Steven Gerrard – but at around 300 quid a pop, that scuffed and faded signature would make it the most expensive cross field drive you ever buried! No, the proper place for you Gerrard signed shirt is on the wall, framed and proud.
Fortunately, most signed football shirts are offered for purchase with a frame included – presumably to ensure that the short lived triumph of the goalscoring scenario described above doesn’t become a reality! Buying your signed shirt with a frame is absolutely the right thing to do – you’ll get a custom built housing for the item that you’ll never find anywhere else for a comparable price, not even if you have one made yourself. You know, one of those deep back frames with space beneath it for a plaque denoting the signatory of the shirt, nice and modern looking for any study, bedroom or living room wall. A framed signed shirt is an outstanding addition to any fan’s home, and represents a quality investment (especially if that shirt is signed by Steven Gerrard, or a player of comparable fame and quality) whose value will only increase over time.
The value of any signed footie shirt goes up yearly, according to the fame of the player or team to whom the signature(s) belong(s). Most fans, of course, aren’t buying to speculate, but to accumulate memories of great players, great teams, but even so... Anyone who does fancy a punt on collecting a few signed football shirts that work as an investment can hardly go wrong. Particularly not if they’re concentrating on the Big Four Premiership clubs, whose team sheets read like a pre-World Cup diner party. Get hold of a Manchester United signed shirt, for example, and you’ll have authenticated signatures of some of the greatest players in the world. They’re not going down in value no matter what.
Signed shirts
Pop:Arsenal signed shirts, Manchester United signed shirts
How can you tell if your signed shirts, that’s signed football shirts, are authentic? Good question, in a world where anyone with half a brain can put together a pretty reasonable Internet scam in minutes. Certainly a reasonable enough scam that plenty of unwitting customers will be fooled by it. And who wants to spend the best part of three hundred quid on something that turns out to be worth less than the price of a match day ticket?
The more famous the player, or team, with which the signature of signatures are involved, the higher the likelihood of scamming. Why? Well, partly because there are simply more people looking, for example, for Arsenal signed shirts, or Manchester United signed shirts; and partly because the simple fact that the big teams are full of famous people means it’s easier to forge their signatures. The more instances of a genuine signature there are on the market, the easier it is to flood that market with fakes. A simple numbers game says that people are less likely to notice a few actual fakes mixed in with hundreds of examples of genuine signatures, with all the variation you’d expect from names signed so many times.
Fortunately for the buyer, there are a few simple precautions one can take: and a few simple checks you can make to ensure that your signed shirts are the real deal. First up is simple website selection. Anyone who is willing to buy a signed football shirt form a site that looks like it’s been built in someone’s shed (you know what we mean, all free ads and horrible Day-Glo colours) deserves everything they get. Go to reputable places where there are real structures in place to protect consumer rights. Any site with no returns policy, or even a site with a very poorly advertised returns policy, should be avoided.
Next – a little research. Shirt signings don’t take place very often, particularly where the big name teams are concerned. It’s not hard to find out when batches of signed shirts were completed by team members – just get in touch with the club in question if you’ve any doubts. Plus, the outfit selling the shirts ought to have official documentation to back their authenticity. The industry standard involves “seen” records – that is, actual visual recordings, either dated photos or a video clip, of the players in question signing the shirt. Arsenal signed shirts and Manchester United signed shirts bearing genuine signatures should be supplied with a certificate of authenticity that refers to this seen documentation.
As with anything that could be faked, and often is – if in doubt, don’t buy. Though patronising recognised retail web sites ought to be enough to make sure you’re getting what you pay for.
United signed shirt
Pop: Everton signed shirt, West Ham signed shirt, Rooney signed shirt
It’s the ultimate fan statement – the kind of thing that every die hard fan wants hanging on his or her bedroom wall. A United signed shirt. Imagine! The signatures of Messrs Rooney, Tevez and co, authentically documented and scribbled across the back of a genuine team jersey. Home or away. Heck, if you’re really loyal, both. Why not?
A signed team shirt is a great way to commemorate a successful season – and the only way to memorialise those perfect teams that crop up from time to time. You know the kind of thing we mean. Every now and then, a club manages to gather the ideal complement of players together – the kind of squad that gets talked about in hushed voices on the terraces for years to come. The Spurs side in the early 90s, when the Famous Five played that diamond formation in the middle of the park. The Arsenal team that went unbeaten for nearly two whole seasons. The late 80s Liverpool squad. The current Man U team. A United signed shirt will immortalise that side forever, in a special frame no less, on your wall, in your study – wherever that private place you go to relax is. The great thing about all these teams, these legends in the making, is that everyone knows what they are at the time – so there’s no hindsight, no “if only I’d bought a Rooney signed shirt” or “I wish I’d bought that Everton signed shirt”. You know, now, if your team is experiencing one of those purple patches: and that means you can go out and buy the shirt already knowing that it immortalises one of the truly great teams.
Imagine owning a West Ham signed shirt from the year they almost beat Liverpool in the cup final. A United signed shirt from any of their world beating seasons. What must it be like, owning a shirt covered with the authenticated signatures of that legendary 1999 Champion’s League winning side? For a fan, those memories will go on forever: and for an investor, well, owning something like that is like finding a gold mine under your garden shed. Guaranteed appreciation.
Get yourself a current squad United shirt, or a single player signed shirt from the still world beating Manchester team, and you’ll be setting up for years of your own enjoyment – or a nice quick cash return if you choose to sell the thing in a few years’ time. A Rooney signed shirt, for example, is always going to be worth money – more so every year. As with anything that continually appreciates, the time to buy is now, before it gets any pricier.
Arsenal signed shirt
Pop: Pele signed shirt, David Beckham signed shirt, Rangers signed shirt
What’s the dream gift of every Gooner? An Arsenal signed shirt, of course. Some of the most loyal fans in the country (they’re turning Highbury into flats, you know, and they’ve all already been snapped up by slavering hordes of Arsenal faithful), the Gooners are nuts about their memorabilia: particularly when that memorabilia is immortalising one of the best squads English football has ever seen. Current squad shirts, signed by the Arsenal team, are right up there amongst football’s most impressive (and potentially valuable) souvenir items – ranked with the best of the best. An Arsenal signed shirt holds value like a Pele signed shirt or a David Beckham signed shirt. Top of the class, top of the game and top of future price lists for years to come.
It’s the old adage, then, for the average Gooner. Buy and keep, or buy and sell? Technically speaking, of course, a person could pick up a current Arsenal shirt, hold onto it for a few years and then sell it at a stupid profit – giving them enough capital to buy a new signed team shirt and have a profit back in the bank too. But that doesn’t take into account the “now” value of the current jersey. In the same way that a Pele signed shirt or a David Beckham signed shirt is what it is because of who signed it, an Arsenal signed shirt from today’s squad is what it is because those current players have touched and autographed it. Selling one on for a profit and buying a new team shirt would negate the object, for a fan, of owning the thing in the first place. The newer shirt wouldn’t be “that” team shirt – any more than a Rangers signed shirt, for example, would be the same thing as one signed by Beckham or Pele.
That said, mind, there’s plenty to interest both investor and fan alike when you look at signed shirts bearing the signatures of the current Rangers squad. Rangers are one of those peculiar teams that manage to get hold of every legendary footballer in the world, at one point or another – usually just after the zenith of their career, and therefore the pinnacle of their popularity. At any given moment, a Rangers team is full of stupidly famous and ludicrously talented men: which means that a Rangers signed shirt, like a current Arsenal signed shirt, is likely to represent an investment that just keeps on appreciating.
All this talk of money, your average Gooner will tell you, is beside the point. The thing about being a fan is loyalty, blind and never ending. And the thing about buying a signed shirt, be it a Pele signed shirt, a Rooney signed shirt or a full team jersey for Arsenal or Rangers, is this: it reminds you of that never to be repeated team. A signed team shirt like that lives long after the team has disbanded – and that, to the die hard footie fan, is everything.
