Regardless of the World Cup winner, merchandise always loses

The World Cup is in full swing. While we remain in our small, football-mad country discuss line-ups, substitutions and the unprecedented performance of Cape Verde (!), a supply chain is running at full capacity somewhere. It is producing products with a shelf life of just a few weeks. The Dutch 'Juichjack', the World Cup dressing gown, the prediction shirt. You name it. Millions are involved, from production to marketing. Thinking about what happens to all that orange polyester after the tournament, however, is not on the agenda.

Do not get me wrong. I am a big Oranje [Orange, the signature Dutch colour] fan. When I was eleven, I was in the orange march in Stuttgart on the way to the Netherlands versus Ivory Coast match. It is one of the best memories of my life. Savings campaigns and Oranje merchandise surrounding these kinds of tournaments are part of the experience. These millions of shirts and other merchandise cannot be ignored. The question that remains is simple: what happens to all that merchandise after the tournament?

What we already know

UEFA estimates that up to 60 percent of the shirts worn by players are destroyed at the end of the season. In Europe, between 4 and 9 percent of all unsold textile products are also destroyed annually before they have ever been worn. This accounts for approximately 5.6 million tonnes of CO2. There are no hard figures on what happens to items that are sold but end up in the bin after the tournament. Nobody keeps track of how many World Cup shirts disappear into residual waste after the summer. That is precisely the problem: what is not measured is not addressed.

An interesting detail: from July 19, 2026, two days after the World Cup final, it will be forbidden for large companies in the EU to destroy unsold clothing, accessories and shoes. The timing is a coincidence, but a telling one. For brands currently producing World Cup collections, this is no longer a distant issue. It is becoming regulation.

Sense and nonsense of event-related fashion

Event merchandise taps into a collective feeling of pride, nostalgia and celebrating something together. There is value in that. It also has a built-in problem: uncertainty. A brand that buys a World Cup collection does so based on a gamble. If the Netherlands were to have won the world title, the purchase was logical in retrospect. If the country is eliminated in the group stage, you are left with a huge mountain of products whose emotional relevance has evaporated within three weeks.

This makes this type of merchandise economically fundamentally different from a regular collection. With regular clothing, you can still correct disappointing sales with markdowns or by carrying it over to a next season. For World Cup products, there is no market left after the final match, regardless of the tournament's outcome. In both scenarios, a plan for the surplus is almost always missing. The only difference is the quantity.

The question is therefore not whether events should generate fashion. The question is whether the industry adapts the design and purchasing of these products to that predictable uncertainty, or pretends it is ordinary clothing that just happens to bear a logo.

How it can be done

A good example comes from our own country, the Netherlands. The Rotterdam-based upcycling company FC88, with its 'Reclaim The Hype' campaign, highlighted the scale at which football shirts are discarded. It builds on this by offering to turn that surplus into bucket hats, bags and bum bags. They now work with parties such as the KNVB, UEFA and various clubs, who send in their old collections and receive new products in return.

These kinds of models show that a take-back scheme does not have to be an extra cost, but can become a revenue model. Other directions are obvious: a drop-off point at the shop where the promotion was running; a collaboration with a charity shop chain; or a sharper estimate in advance of what is actually needed in each scenario, so that overproduction is limited at the source.

Real work begins after kick-off

The 2026 World Cup, with 48 countries and 104 matches, is the largest ever, and therefore also involves the largest amount of merchandise ever. With the regulations coming into force in July and initiatives like FC88 already showing that things can be done differently, there is no longer an excuse to treat take-back as an afterthought. It should become as standard as the launch itself.