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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Tanya Aldred

It’s time to get shirty about the short life of the football top

An Ipswich Town shirt on sale in the club shop
An old Ipswich shirt is listed at a knockdown sale price. Photograph: Joe Toth/BPI/Shutterstock

When Joanna Czutkowna buried a Manchester United jersey, a cotton T-shirt and a wool-cotton jumper in her Lancashire farm and dug it up a year later, the video went viral. The T-shirt had disappeared, apart from the seams (sewn with polyester thread), the jumper was 80% gone, but the United shirt remained – grubby but indestructible. (Insert joke here)

The big reveal was not a surprise, certainly not to Czutkowna, who has worked in textiles and sustainability for 20 years, but it was a reminder: a football jersey is not just for Christmas, or even the next hundred Christmases.

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