subject: Buy Football Shirts to Celebrate the New Season [print this page] The psychological value of the football shirt is undeniable, both for fan and team. It marks one out as part of the clan, the tribe and it signals to the adored ones, those eleven men legging it around a rectangle of grass in pursuit of an inflated piece of PVC, that their struggles are not in vain. That their battles do not go unnoticed. To buy football shirts has very little, unlike the purchase of anything else in the UK wardrobe, to do with fashion: it's about hope, and expectation, and aligning oneself with an ideal no matter how ludicrous it might seem at the time. A very British pastime, then, and one that receives an injection of fresh life every season. Now is the time, while all those boys in all those teams still believe that anything is possible.
