Portrait of a legend: An image of Lionel Messi wearing Inter Miami’s distinctive pink jersey on the wall by a sales counter at the Adidas store in Manhattan. — Photos: NYT
MIAMI: All of a sudden, after a single summer, the pink jersey is everywhere. It has become almost impossible to acquire, yet there it is, paradoxically, on the backs of thousands of fans thronging American stadiums, hanging from market stalls in Bangkok and Buenos Aires, Argentina, a vivid flash on almost every field where children gather to play football in England.
That the jersey has become, apparently overnight, the hottest piece of sports merchandise on the planet is a simple, capitalist equation: the result of an irresistible combination of one of the most recognisable and beloved athletes of his generation; a distinctive, exotic colour; and the ruthless efficiency of textile factories in South–East Asia.
Somehow, though, few people saw it coming. Tor Southard was better placed than most, but even he was caught unaware.
As Adidas’ senior director for football in North America, he had been receiving emails from colleagues for nearly a year asking if the company’s biggest star, Lionel Messi, would be joining Inter Miami, also a client of Adidas.
Selling like hot cakes: A shopkeeper with a Messi jersey at a shop in Rio de Janeiro.
As far as he knew, it was just a rumour. Like the rest of the planet, Southard learned it was true only on June 7, the day Messi announced his intentions in a rare interview with two Spanish news outlets.
For many, the immediate question was the football one.
Six months after winning the World Cup with Argentina, why was Messi, the finest player of his generation and arguably the best of all time, leaving the elite clubs and competitions of Europe to join a team that ranked among the worst in the comparative backwater of America’s top league, Major League Soccer?
For Southard, and for Adidas, there was a rather more pressing matter. Within a couple of days of Messi’s announcement, the company had received almost 500,000 requests from stores and suppliers for jerseys in Miami’s soft, electric pink. It is a specific fabric and a specific shade: Pantone 1895C.
“It’s not like it was white, and we had inventory we could repurpose,” Southard said.
Even if they could not foresee quite what a phenomenon the jersey would become, and quite how many people would clamour to get their hands on one, Southard and his colleagues had some sense of what was about to happen.
Adidas was going to need more of that fabric. A lot more.
Big in Japan: A Messi jersey, in Inter Miami’s distinctive pink colour, hangs in the corner at a shop outside Tokyo.
‘No. 1 priority’
On the day Messi announced he would sign for Inter Miami, Adidas had a stock of Inter Miami jerseys in stores and storage facilities around the United States. It did not last.
The shirts sold out so quickly that Southard said it seemed the inventory simply “evaporated.”
Getting the fabric to make more – and fast – was just the first step.
Although Adidas would not start selling official Messi jerseys until his contract was formally signed on July 15, it placed orders for vast rolls of the pink fabric needed to make them within 24 hours of his interview on Spanish television in the first week of June.
The risk, of course, was that the deal could still collapse.
“It’s a trade-off you make for speed,” Southard said.
In ordinary circumstances, retailers order jerseys as many as nine months in advance. Major sportswear brands, like Adidas and Nike, generally prefer to produce large batches of team gear, rather than manufacturing to meet demand, as fast fashion chains tend to do.
Given the number of what the industry terms “chase buys” – a sudden influx of orders in unanticipated volumes for Messi’s Inter Miami jersey, Adidas knew its usual playbook would not work.
The perfect fit: Messi and Inter Miami co-owners (from left) Jorge Mas, Jose Mas and David Beckham pose with the 2022 World Cup winner’s new jersey during an event. In the span of three months, the Argentine superstar has made the eye-catching pink jersey the hottest piece of sports merchandise on the planet.
It had learned that from experience. In 2021, when Cristiano Ronaldo returned to Manchester United, one of the handful of retailers Adidas works with, Fanatics, asked for 1 million more jerseys.
A year later, after Messi helped Argentina win the World Cup, Adidas had to produce and ship an extra 400,000 Argentine national team shirts in the span of three months.
Getting pink jerseys bearing Messi’s name and No. 10 into the market, Southard said, immediately became Adidas’ “No. 1 priority, globally.”
To streamline the process, the company sourced the pink, recycled polyester fabric for the jerseys as close as possible to the factories in South–East Asia that would make them. Orders for other details like logos and crests were expedited at other facilities, sometimes leapfrogging the production of apparel for other Adidas teams. To cut down on shipping times, the first batches of the Messi jerseys were sent out in small shipments, almost as soon as they came off the production line.
The frantic production effort worked. Initially, Adidas had told its retailers to begin selling jerseys with a promise of delivery by Oct 15. But the first editions arrived in the United States by July 18. They were sent straight to Miami, where demand was highest.
They sold out almost instantly.
‘Everyone has a hookup’
On a street corner in Miami’s wealthy Brickell neighbourhood one evening last month, two young men had set up a pop-up Messi store, their racks groaning with Inter Miami jerseys in pink and an alternate version – black with pink trim – that the team wear on the road. This was the work of the imaginatively titled Messi Miami Shop.
The name sounds official. The online store looks it, too. It sells two versions of the Messi jersey, as most sportswear manufacturers now do: a “player version” made with high-quality material and an athletic cut, and a “replica” designed for fans whose bodies might not have the precise dimensions of an elite athlete.
The Messi Miami Shop is not, though, affiliated in any way with Messi, Inter Miami or Adidas. (It is, though, a shop.) Its jerseys had come, instead, from a contact in Thailand, purchased for US$10 (RM48) apiece.
“This is Miami,” one of the sellers said. “Everyone has a hook-up.”
Unprecedented: Messi winning his eighth Ballon d’Or in Paris on Oct 30. — AP
And a mark-up: The stall was selling the jerseys at US$25 (RM119) a children’s edition and as much as US$65 (RM310) for an “authentic” inauthentic adult version of the team’s black jersey.
The sellers, who declined to give their names for reasons that should be obvious, had sold around 30 in a couple of hours, they said. But they are not the only ones hustling.A few nights earlier, outside Exploria Stadium in Orlando, Florida, a different group of hawkers were doing their own brisk business in Messi jerseys.
Messi was not playing that night – he missed several weeks of the season because of an injury – but Inter Miami were in town, and plenty of fans were prepared to pay US$40 (RM191) for a pink jersey bearing his name, even if it had shoddy stitching and was plucked from a backpack.
Despite all of Adidas’ attempts to get its official Messi jerseys into stores as quickly as possible, the clamour for them – any version of them – has proved so great that counterfeits have flooded the global market to meet the shortfall.
Although the company says it has now largely caught up with the backlog of orders, it has found that it is still selling jerseys far faster than it can produce them, and not just in the United States.
In Buenos Aires, where Messi’s status as a national treasure was sealed by victory in the World Cup, there are pink jerseys for sale in store after store and kiosk after kiosk along Calle Florida, one of the Argentine capital’s teeming shopping streets, and in the stalls of the bustling San Telmo Market. At some vendors, the fakes go for about US$50 (RM238).
In Europe, where tribal affiliations to local clubs run deep, Miami jerseys are suddenly commonplace. At a training session for elementary school children last month in Manchester, England, the usual concentration of Manchester United, Manchester City and Liverpool gear was flecked with a half dozen pink Inter Miami jerseys, each bearing Messi’s name.
It is difficult to overstate the scale of demand. Official sales have surpassed every benchmark Adidas could have imagined, Southard said: more than the frenzy that accompanied David Beckham’s move to the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2007; beyond the rush prompted by Ronaldo’s return to Manchester United in 2021; beyond the clamour for Messi’s Argentina shirt in the aftermath of Qatar 2022.
Inter Miami are now the best-selling Adidas football jersey in North America, ahead of all five of the storied European clubs that the brand traditionally regards as the crown jewels of its portfolio: Manchester United, Real Madrid, Juventus, Bayern Munich and Arsenal.
Since July, Fanatics, which dominates sports apparel in the United States, has sold more Messi jerseys than for any other football player, and any athlete at all except Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts.
No player, in any sport, has ever sold more jerseys on the site in the first 24 hours after switching teams than Messi – who picked up his eighth Ballon d’Or on Oct 30 – did in July. — NYT
