Commentary: The fanaticism and faddism of football fashion

LONDON: News that Crystal Palace have become the first football club in the English Premier League to appoint a creative director was greeted by most of their fan base with a shrug. “Can he play at right back?” was among the more popular responses. 

Kenny Annan-Jonathan, a “brand architect” who founded the sports marketing agency The Mailroom in 2017, has been enlisted to oversee apparel collections and fashion brand partnerships at the south London club.

He has previously worked with former Palace winger Wilfried Zaha, who recently left the club after a nine-season spell, as well as West Ham’s Michail Antonio and the sprinter Daryll Neita. Annan-Jonathan says he will create “products that go beyond typical sports team merch and grow the team’s fan base”. His first collection will debut in September. 

Would you consider wearing Crystal Palace merch if you weren’t an Eagles fan? They finished mid-table last season and are relatively unknown as an international brand. Palace haven’t enjoyed huge fashionability since Ian Wright and Mark Bright were a dazzling goalscoring partnership.

But that was in the 1980s. And notwithstanding that I am a blood relative of a season ticket-holding, diehard member of the Eagles brethren, I imagine the club will struggle to become much more than a niche interest in an arena awash with bigger, more explosive brands. 

Then again, the announcement comes at a time when football is cresting in popularity in all sorts of new unlikely ways. Who would have imagined a few years ago that the hottest football shirt this summer would be a candy-pink number from Inter Miami, a below-average Major League Soccer team in the United States?

Yet sales of the number 10 jersey have been frenzied since Lionel Messi