Recently, rugby supporters seem to love having a moan. Especially on social media. In fact, if you’re a rugby supporter on social media and you don’t hate at least 50% of the things about rugby, then are you even a true rugby fan?

It’s almost as if hating the game has become the new love of the game – which is such a weird concept. If you haven’t tweeted at least once that Rassie Erasmus should be executed in a public marketplace for daring to select a 6:2 split or that ALL rugby coverage should only be broadcast on which ever provider you and your family happen to subscribe to, then surely you really aren’t performing your rugby ‘gatekeeper’ efficiently enough.

But if there is one subject that always stirs rugby’s faeces, it’s the cost of rugby shirts. And just like Bonfire Night, you can pop the date in your calendar from which this cost-based bin-fire of a discussion will take place. Usually by the end of August, most clubs, and many test nations, have launched their new kits. The price of these shirts, at launch, typically hovers around the £80 to £100 mark.

The cost of it all

Now, don’t get me wrong, that is not cheap for a top/ shirt. If you wanted a normal non-branded top, you could get them for five quid or less on Amazon, Asda or Primark etc. But you’re not buying just any old shirt – a point that many people seem to ignore. In fact, many of the people who ignore that point will quite often argue their corner whilst standing in front of you wearing a Lacoste Polo shirt, North Face fleece or a £100 pair of Nike Air Force One.

But before discussing the issue further, we must of course mention the impact of inflation on the cost of buying anything. Brexit, Covid and the situation in Ukraine have driven up inflation to an uncomfortable level for everyone. You need a ‘side hustle’ or the death of a wealthy relative just to buy three pints of continental lager in most city centres. And a plate of plain ol’ fish and chips now costs the same as deep fried dolphin served with a side of fries that were seasoned by that gold leaf-obsessed chef who sounds like a heavily salinated body of coastal water.

Related: England rugby jerseys through the years, ranked

Inflation aside, the debate over the cost of rugby shirts needs reframing. When you’re buying a rugby shirt, you’re not just buying another version of the type of shirt you wear when you’re playing for your local club, you’re buying a branded piece of clothing. And more than that, you’re buying a piece of sports marketing. 

Wearing the badge

The price of rugby shirts isn’t even out of line with that of many other professional sports. The average cost of an NFL shirt is about £100, the same as a Premier League soccer shirt. But for some reason, rugby fans seem unaware of this commercial reality. The marketing and purchasing people at the various clubs aren’t pricing these items to deliberately exclude you, piss you off, or make you feel inadequate. They’re priced at a commercially viable purchase price – like all things. And the reality is that if you don’t buy one, plenty of others will. That’s how sports marketing works. That’s how all marketing works.

Players posing in the new shirt (England rugby Instagram)

It may be due to the ‘amateur’ ethos that still exists in rugby. Where supporters love the improvements in the quality of the game that professionalism has brought, but still want it to come with the amateur price tag. It seems that most fans want a season ticket, 12 months of TV coverage and a shirt for the same price as a newspaper in 1975. The sport has moved on and so must these attitudes to funding the game. 

Then there’s the wider point of where your money goes having purchased the shirt. If you buy a £100 pair of trainers, that money is going purely into a corporate P+L and the funding of a larger yacht for the board members. When you buy a rugby shirt it isn’t. That money is helping contribute directly to the success of your team – in the current climate, the survival of that team.

Sometimes you’ll hear the argument that rugby shirts are priced high due to the somewhat elite nature of rugby in some countries – England in particular. But that isn’t the case at all. Rugby isn’t an elite sport in many of the countries where it is played – Wales for one. Also, if you attempted to buy Oasis tickets this past weekend, you’ll have noticed that tickets were about £150 quid a pop. And they’ve been priced by two lads who were brought up on a council estate in Manchester.

New shirt for no one

Then there’s the issue which no one likes to discuss. If you don’t want to pay that kind of money for a rugby shirt, don’t. You really don’t have to. It isn’t a legal right that everyone must have access to a supporter’s shirt. I really like Rafael Nadal as a tennis player, and I would love to buy one of his French Open tops complete with the matching shorts – so that I can wear them when I lose 6-0 6-0 in my next South Wales veterans match. But I refuse to pay £75 for the top and £50 for the shorts. 

It may be that much of the angst arises from the fact that supporters don’t really see much difference from one season’s designs to the next – and in this they may have a point. The shirt designs rarely change drastically. But that’s because it is very difficult to innovate in rugby shirt design, without losing the heritage of brand that has been built up over decades. The All-Blacks’ shirt design being a case in point. Redesigning the AB’s shirt is genuinely one of the most thankless tasks in the whole of the design world. There are few teams in any sport where the name of the team and the entire brand ethos revolves around the description of a single solid colour.

Related: New Zealand rugby jerseys through the years, ranked

Welsh fans celebrate a try against the All Blacks, November 20, 2004. (Photo by Ross Land/Getty Images)

It may also be a generational thing. My father and his generation rarely discuss the topic of rugby shirts or their price. Largely because they don’t wear official merchandise to games and never have. A red scarf or a bobble hat is still deemed by them, and many others, as the same acceptable show of support for the Welsh national team in 2024, as it was in 1974.

If there was a solution to this, it would possibly revolve around creating a supporter’s jersey that would allow you to support more than one team on one shirt. Thereby creating better value and attracting customers at a lower price point.  For instance, with buy-in from the various leagues and test nations, you could create a blank supporter’s jersey, with subtle patches of velcro etc, that allowed the consumer to add the official badges of the teams they support. The base shirt would cost, say £35, and the official badges would cost £15. Thereby creating an entirely different shirt model for certain supporters to show their love for multiple clubs and nations etc.

Read more: Discover the Premiership rugby jerseys for the 2024-25 season

To conclude

None of the above will have helped this debate of course. Rugby shirts will always be more expensive than many would like and that isn’t going to change. It’s not like you can cut the retail price in half and hope that the rest of the world outside of rugby will make the difference in profit, by increasing the volume. It’s not like a brand such as BMW, where chopping the cost of a 3-Series in half to is going to potentially double sales. There is a finite market for rugby shirts and that market has a very narrow supporter base at both club and test level. 

Much like the issue of rugby being better in the old days, which it wasn’t, the issue of shirt costs will never go away. And if I had £1 for every time I’ve had this discussion with a supporter, I still wouldn’t have enough to buy shirt, because they are so bloody expensive.