From the breath-taking Venetian canals rich in history to the grandiose of Athens’s philosophical culture, football kit campaigns have found a new wave in marketing.
A Munich-based design company Bureau Borsche has decided to take the fashion field by storm. In our current era of football, nothing has become more important than wearing your club’s shirt with pride and style.
Some have even lead to impressive on the field performances.
“We didn’t really know in that moment that it would create a change,” Mirko Borsche, founder of the company, tells the Kitroom Collective.
Jersey promotional campaigns, or ‘kit drops’, have evolved significantly over the years. Where clubs once relied on simply showcasing the new shirt on the team captain, today’s launches are full-blown marketing events and teams have found new extravagant and artistic ways to draw in not just ‘local fans’ but worldwide attention.
But why has there been such an investment into the advertising of a shirt and why have certain clubs been so successful?
Well for one, you cannot disregard the importance of a well designed shirt.
A football kit has to have a sense of identity, whilst also being unique and most importantly, looks good. It’s a pretty hard balance.
Designing the kits was Borsche’s first step. His initial idea was to create something that was a souvenir for those visiting the cities and something that was for more than just football.
“I wanted to show that a football jersey can be worn on a normal day, in the club, at a festival,” he explains.
“They were timeless”.
This allowed his team alongside ‘Kappa’ to create something completely unique. The historic Italian fashion brand allowed a lot of creative freedom to Bureau Borsche when designing, unlike other mainstream brands.
“I was inspired by the nostalgic jerseys form the 2000s, with the loose cuts and polo collars.”
Find out more: https://bureauborsche.com/projects/venezia-fc/jersey-design-season-22-23 – Bureau Borsche
This blended with their Borsche’s fashion background, such as collaborations with Balenciaga and Palm Angels, everyone involved knew they had something special on their hands.
A shirt that would not only represent the team and the city it originates from but also provide a new take on what a football kit should or could be.
Then comes the marketing campaign. People have got to feel connected to what is being shown, whether that’s well-known local monuments being backdrops to the photos or retired professionals doing kick-ups in the middle of the stadium.
Audiences need to feel and have something to gravitate to. Social media has given brands the chance to access a global audience, but then comes the issue of global competition.
This forces smaller teams to get even more creative and find a new curve that is more than just football. Companies are now following these same rules and are putting more work into their kits, to be more than just a shirt to get sweaty in.
Football shirt collector and online content creator, Jay Tomlins, was one of the many fans of the change in style.
Tomlins runs his own TikTok page as well as contributing to RetroFootballKits with 21.5k followers, amalgamating over 600K likes.
He couldn’t praise the new additions enough.
“It’s kind of like a fridge magnet but better,” he says.
By giving the players a kit to be proud to play in rather than a generic template as well as tapping into a younger audience, was one of the main goals of Borsche’s team.
“When I wear something from my club, I want to wear something that represents my ideas of the club, the city and something classic,” Tomlins explains.
“Bespoke kits get an appreciation from other groups outside the club,” which is something a smaller club like Venezia FC and Athens Kallithea FC needed.
The unique yet classical feel that the new brands were trying to achieve followed into the Borsche marketing campaign. Photography along the Venetian canals heavily influenced by luxury fashion along with an artistically shot short film about a love story on the coast of Athens were the lengths taken when promoting these shirts.
“It was closer to a fashion editorial shoot,” Borsch says.
Find out more: https://bureauborsche.com/projects/venezia-fc/jersey-design-season-22-23 – Bureau Borsche
Some might think, what has this got to do with football? These ideas behind the campaign made almost unheard of clubs gain worldwide recognition.
Both new sets of ideas led to new growth with the team’s social media growing by up to 30% and large increases in revenue between seasons such as Venezia 23/24 gaining €3 million in revenue. 98% of those sales were worldwide, 0.5% being in Venice.
When looking back on previous kit releases and campaigns, although successful, there have been stark changes.
An example of this would be looking at the Premier League team, Aston Villa. A large part of their 2013/14 jersey campaign was focused on the players rather than the actual design of the kits, only using detailed headshots when they began teasing the release.
This was also the first season the women’s team was being included into the campaign.
The impact of breaking into the global market cannot be understated. Dr. James Obiegbu, a lecturer of Experiential Marketing at the University of Bournemouth, explained the intricacies when considering international sales and how complex they are.
“To break into a global market you have to do vigorous research to understand cultural nuances whilst creating a strong digital market,” Obiegbu says.
Stressing the importance of this cultural adaptation can be seen in Borsche’s campaign, using common practices in a unique setting.
The new innovative design alongside a campaign that can be visually understood as culturally significant to the club they represent, allows parties from all over the globe to engage with the art.
This creative narrative was the key to their success.
“There needs to be a compelling message which highlights the unique values of your brand.” The link of art to the two cities made it so the content they had created when promoting was easily understood by those outside the localities, gaining that advantage that they so needed,” Obiegbu says.
As a consumer and a football shirt enthusiast, Tomlins shared his love for the original branding approach, and how they are starting to leak into other leagues.
“A campaign needs to know who it is and has to make you feel something… With the new generation it’s about everything, the fashion, the music, the culture as well as the football,” Tomlins says.
Some traditional football fans may not see the same way, but these launches were incredibly effective.
After these marketing victories, the clubs had found success with both Venezia FC and Athens Kallithea FC securing promotion to their top flight leagues in their respective countries.
The money from the kits also prevented them from having to sign with tricky or unheard of sponsors like many of the biggest clubs do nowadays.
Not only does it allow the kits to have a more original look, but it prevents these smaller clubs from being exploited by massive companies.
“There is less dependency on sponsorship, who can leave you without having your own brand… it leaves more money for players and fewer for weird sponsors,”Borshce says
Giving the National Museum of Contemporary Art Αthens (ΕΜΣΤ) a place on the kit was just the icing on the cake.
Find out more: https://bureauborsche.com/projects/athens-kallithea-fc/jersey-design-season-24-25 – Bureau Borsche
Kit designs, and the campaigns that launch them, are constantly evolving. Cultural references are becoming more embedded in their creation, with clubs increasingly drawing on music, fashion, and local identity to shape both aesthetics and messaging. This shift signals a growing influence of culture within football’s visual identity.
Naturally, there will always be purists who argue that these modern twists dilute the essence of the beautiful game. But ultimately, when you wear your team’s shirt, it’s about feeling represented and proud. And with the direction kit culture is heading, it’s achieving just that, in more powerful and personal ways than ever before.