The football fan who has collected 3,000 shirts from around the world

What do you do when you have nearly 3,000 football shirts in your possession? If you are the Dutch football fan and collector Arjan Wijngaard, you allocate a room in your house as an exhibition space and log every single shirt you buy in a comprehensive online catalogue. Arjan has been collecting shirts from around the globe for the past 25 years, beginning with an Everton kit he was given in 1997, and he now boasts one of the largest, if not the largest, personal collections in Europe.

What drew him to the idea of collecting shirts? “Of course, I liked football. That is an important thing if you want to collect shirts. There is no particular reason why I chose shirts, though. Some people choose scarves – I have some scarves as well because, if I can’t get a shirt when I visit a stadium or a game, I try to buy a scarf instead. Actually, maybe I should have chosen scarves or pins; they are a lot cheaper and don’t need that much space!”

Take a wander into Arjan’s showroom and it is easy to see what he means. The walls are fitted with racks that groan beneath the enormous weight of his collection. The door is an incongruous rectangle of white in an otherwise ubiquitous banquet of colour. And in the window stand two mannequins in green and blue raiment. It is a veritable sacrarium of shirts – from clubs grand and small. “In general I like to collect shirts from clubs that are not very easy to find,” says Arjan. “Like lower and non-league, for example, steps nine and 10 of the English pyramid or clubs from countries not known as famous football countries, like New Zealand or Tanzania.”

Why did Arjan set up the website Voetbal Shirts to display his shirts? “There were a few reasons. Firstly, it is to show others what I have.