This is the football shirt England fans want most – and it isn’t the current kit
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Katie RosseinskyMon, June 22, 2026 at 5:00 AM UTC
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Almost every family has a World Cup tradition, and ours has always revolved around an Italia '90 England home shirt. It was bought before Bobby Robson's team made it to the semi-finals, and before Gazza's tears – making it older than me and either of my sisters.
In the Nineties and early Noughties, we'd take it in turns to wear it for matches. These days, whenever a big tournament rolls around, we still battle it out for temporary custody – because what my dad didn't foresee when he bought this kit 36 years ago was that he wasn't just repping the Three Lions. He was, in fact, making a pretty savvy fashion investment.
That Italia '90 shirt, with its navy blue collar, its holographic-style shadow stripes and Umbro's rhombus logo on the left chest, is now recognised as a high watermark for football shirt design. No wonder, then, that my siblings and I want to be the ones to wear it to the pub.
If you take a look around when you're out watching a game, you'll soon notice that in 2026, the most fashionable option isn't some boxfresh kit – it's a vintage shirt that combines sport and style history. "It's been really interesting to see how football shirts have developed as a fashion statement as well as a collector's item," says Freddie Rose, co-founder of pre-loved fashion brand Vintage Threads, which has stores in London and Amsterdam, as well as selling at Selfridges.
"It's just exploded," agrees co-founder Charlie Oxley. We're speaking in the aftermath of England's 4-2 victory against Croatia, and when he was out watching the match, his professional eye spotted "an array of Nineties England shirts, 2000s [shirts] and England memorabilia, which also plays into that".
It seems we can't get enough of football throwbacks. On the social media platform Pinterest, UK searches for "vintage football shirts" have increased by 125 per cent over the past six months. Over on second-hand marketplace Vinted, searches for England and Scotland tops have shot up by 500 per cent and 900 per cent from April to June respectively (the latter no doubt buoyed by the Tartan Army's new lease of life for Scotland's first World Cup appearance since 1998).
England's Italia '90 home kit, worn here by Paul Gascoigne, is a retro fashion classic (Getty Images)
Rose and Oxley have been in the vintage game for a decade, and selling football shirts has been a big part of the business from the start, with prices for a jersey starting around the £30 mark and rising based on factors such as design, year, team and player; the most expensive one they can remember selling was around £500. But in the past two or three years, they say, they've noticed a wider demographic picking up these retro designs.
"There's lots of people who would buy the new England shirt every year, but this year they're a bit like, 'actually, I would love to go and find myself something [different],'" Rose says. "It could even be one that harks back to a bar in Ibiza that they used to watch the football at. We found a shirt from Lineker's bar in Ibiza [the notorious spot owned by Gary's younger brother Wayne] from 1999 – people love those old school fan moments." And it's not just about the World Cup. "It never ceases to amaze me just how reactive football fans are," Rose adds. "I think since Arsenal won the league, we've seen a 300 per cent spike at least in demand for Arsenal pieces."
Shirts on offer from Vintage Threads (Vintage Threads)
The "blokecore" fashion trend – think retro sports jerseys, oversized denim and Adidas Sambas or Gazelles – has, in spite of its, well, blokey name, widened out the appeal, and so has rising interest in women's football, boosted by various Lioness victories. At Vintage Threads, Rose and Oxley have also seen a rise in "the reworking and upcycling of football shirts", predominantly driven by a female audience. This summer, they teamed up with Manchester City to create custom jackets for the women's team, to celebrate their Women's Super League win.
Big brands are cottoning on to the demand, too, with the likes of Adidas and Nike delving back into their archives to reissue classic kits; the latter's new collaboration with skateboarding brand Palace, modelled by the England team, has a distinctly retro flavour too, and sold out quickly. You can even get a reproduction of my beloved Italia '90 shirt for £50 at Sports Direct, courtesy of retro shirt purveyors Score Draw.
The long-sleeved shirt worn by Beckham when he scored a free kick against Greece is another memorable design (Getty Images)
Tom Rainsford started RetroFootballShirts as a hobby "from the kitchen table" seven years ago. Now he sells shirts through daily streams on the live shopping platform Whatnot. "If you'd told me a few years ago that I'd be doing this as my full time job, I would have laughed at you," he says. There is no "'one size fits all' type of fan", he explains. Instead, customers range from "your hardcore collectors who want to spend big because they see the long-term value", and who "view the shirts as an asset they want to invest in", to the more casual shoppers who "appreciate the vintage football shirts for the fashion element".
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On that more "hardcore" end of the spectrum, he notes, one buyer recently dropped £4,000 during one of his live shopping streams, buying 20 shirts. "Ten of them were real high-end vintage, but then the others were like random shirts from Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Italian second tier teams, Spanish fourth tier…" And the other day, he received a message from a professional player asking him to source an Ireland shirt from 1994 – the last time the World Cup was held in the United States – even though they didn't qualify for this tournament.
Part of the appeal is the simple fact that the quality of older shirts – "the styles, the colours, the boldness", as Oxleyputs it – tends to be much better than their modern equivalents. "Now I think you see a lot of teams using the same template, but with different national colours, whereas back in the day, everyone had their own unique design," he adds. "It's that individuality and that self-expression element that people want – you can really find that in the old school shirts."
It's that individuality and that self-expression element that people want – you can really find that in the old school shirts
Charlie Oxley, Vintage Threads
The Nineties and early Noughties was a "golden era for football shirts", Oxley says, which happily coalesces with our wider nostalgia for that time, and our hankering for its various style hallmarks. And it was also a time when the game felt freer, less commercial. "The state of modern football is constantly being debated – there's definitely touch points you see now, like VAR and the additional teams in the World Cup," Rose adds. "As much as that should be taken with a pinch of salt, I think people definitely do really hark back to the golden era of football, whether that be songs like "Vindaloo" or "Three Lions" right through to the early Noughties and the freedom of expression that footballers had then."
Vintage shirts, Rainsford adds, have the power to "tie you into moments" from your life. He can match memories to a particular style, from the grey design worn when "Gareth Southgate, God bless him, missed the penalty" in the Euro '96 semi-final against Germany – "my first heartbreak in football" – to the classic red worn by Frank Lampard when his "ghost goal" was disallowed (against Germany… again) in South Africa in 2010. Rose and Oxley see something similar happening in store. "Everyone's always picking the shirts up and talking about different memories they have associated with it. It can be 'oh, I remember that, I was at this final with my dad', or 'that was my first ever game,'" Rose says.
Nineties styles like this '96-97 Borussia Dortmund shirt are known for their design flair (RetroFootballShirts / Whatnot)
Designs associated with particularly iconic moments tend to be in high demand, Oxley notes. "You always remember the shirt that Beckham wore when he curled that free kick in against Greece." When theyare out thrifting to source new shirts, "the first thing you do is flip it to see what name is on the back", Rose says, as that adds to the story, too. "If you find a Nineties shirt, it's obviously amazing, and you'll always pick those ones up, particularly if it's a popular club, but if it's got a name on the back, the value goes up exponentially." Scarcity can also drive up prices – goalkeeper kits are more expensive just because there tend to be fewer of them around than the outfield jerseys.
This year marks the first time that the tournament has opened up to include 48 countries, versus the traditional 32, and Rainsford has noticed "a lot more requests for the nations such as Curacao, Cape Verde, nations who are tiny, where this might be their first World Cup".
Italy's blue shirt from their Italia '90 World Cup campaign is a perennial favourite (RetroFootballShirts / Whatnot)
And even though Italy didn't qualify this time around – marking a hat trick of consecutive World Cup misses for the side, who last appeared in the contest in 2014 – he is constantly fielding enquiries for their shirts (the blue Diadora design from Italia '90, with its tricolour collar, is a favourite).
Although the rush of finding a beloved old style can be a heady one, it's worth remaining cautious if you're sourcing pieces online. "Obviously counterfeit shirts have always been a thing, but what we're seeing now is people literally making replicas of vintage shirts," Rose explains. Verifying high-end designer pieces over the Internet tends to be relatively straightforward, as they usually have specific labels with care information, but "with football shirts it's so difficult because they were very much mass produced originally. The authentication is a lot more minimal in terms of the wash tags".
But while a shirt can be "a very easy thing to replicate when you look at it superficially, it's a lot harder to replicate if you were to buy in person", he adds. As soon as you touch it, you'd notice the different feel and texture, "because they were made so differently. And you can always tell when a sponsor or a name's been freshly printed."
Now that football has had some of its personality squeezed out, replaced by corporate interests and identikit designs, Oxley wonders whether fans will be able to look back on our current moment with similar fondness, or whether the Nineties will remain as the pinnacle, the period that gets referenced again and again. "It would be really interesting to know if, in 20 years time, the shirts of today have that appeal," he says. In the meantime, I'm calling dibs on that Italia '90 top this summer.
Source: “AOL Sports”
