football | Tuesday, November 15, 2022 2:22 PM (Revised at: Tuesday, November 15, 2022 2:27 PM)

Which nations are serving the most affordable and expensive vintage looks for the World Cup?

Devang Prasad

The World Cup is here and so is the bevy of colours you’ll see on the kits – both on the pitch and off it. Football shirts are part of mainstream fashion nowadays and unsurprisingly, vintage looks are in.

Bettingexpert looked at the different vintage shirts on sale online and determined which World Cup nations are serving the most expensive and the most affordable vintage looks.

We tallied data from three different websites that sell vintage/classic shirts – classicfootballshirts.co.uk, vintagefootballshirts.com and cultkits.com and then calculated the average price per nation.

Which World Cup nation’s kit is the most expensive, on average?

From the 32 representatives in Qatar, it is Uruguay who top the list for having the most expensive vintage shirts, on average.

The first ever World Cup champions have 26 vintage shirts available for sale and on average, they’re going to cost £215.

The most expensive Uruguay shirt that you can buy is a match worn shirt from 1977. This was donned by a lesser-known defender, Julio Rivadavia, in a friendly against England.

The USA have the second-most expensive kits on average, with a price point of £173 across 105 shirts. They are followed by Serbia with a price point of £171.82 for 23 available shirts.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Ecuador who have the lowest average price for a vintage shirt - £36.50. A caveat though is that there are only two vintage Ecuador shirts available.

Germany is a nation which has 768 vintage shirts available and at a relatively low average price of £52.70.

Vintage England jerseys are relatively affordable and on average, cost lesser than the latest England shirt

England has some of the more affordable vintage shirts available, with an average price point of £63.28. Overall, England have the fifth-cheapest vintage shirts available across all nations at the World Cup.

And with 2,068 different shirts available, you will be spoiled for choice.

The average price point is actually lower than the MRP for the shirts that England will wear at the 2022 World Cup (prices start at £74.25).

The most expensive England shirt is a match-worn 1978 one. Stuart Pearson, who played for Manchester United, West Ham and Hull City and had 15 caps for England, wore this shirt in a 1-0 win over Northern Ireland in the British Home Championship. The Admiral shirt costs a cool £1,999.99.

A more recent one, worn by an English football icon, is also high up in the price range. Michael Owen’s shirt from a 2005 friendly against the Netherlands is priced at £1,499.99.

The most expensive vintage shirts overall?

The three most expensive shirts in our study all happen to be French.

The most expensive one saw action in the 2002 World Cup. Serie A winning Roma defender Vincent Candela wore an Adidas French away kit in a 0-2 loss to Denmark. The tournament was, of course, a disaster for the then reigning champions who were knocked out in the group stages. This shirt is available for sale for £2,499.99.

Other interesting shirts in the most expensive list include a Brazil shirt from the 1998 World Cup and a West Germany shirt from the 1986 World Cup.

Methodology

We used three sources to calculate the number of shirts, types of shirts and average price of shirts - classicfootballshirts.co.uk, vintagefootballshirts.co.uk and cultkits.com
The average price of shirts per nation was calculated by dividing the total cost across the three websites by the total number of shirts available for each nation across the three websites
To calculate the ten most expensive ones, we looked at the most expensive shirts for each nation across all three websites and ranked them accordingly