"We are (not) the champions my friend!"

February 8, 2008 4:35 PM

What happens to the losing side's swag in a big sporting event? (Obviously, it's disposed of. But how? And by whom?)

Every time you watch a big-time sporting event (most recently, the Superbowl) you see the winners putting on caps and T-shirts that say, for example, "NY GIANTS SUPERBOWL 2008 CHAMPS AMIRITE?!!?" So, what happens to all the swag that says "NE PATRIOTS SUPERBOWL CHAMPS YEAH!!!" I know it's kind of a silly question, but there must be tons of this stuff out there -- for the divisional playoffs, for almost every other major league and college level sport, etc. So, somebody gets rid of it, but where does it go? I'm thinking it gets discretely shipped to various college towns to clothe irony-minded hipsters. If not, then we clearly have an untapped market on our hands.

posted by bardic to clothing, beauty, & fashion (7 comments total)

The NFL sends theirs to Africa
posted by chrisamiller at 4:37 PM on February 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Also from that article:

Major League Baseball destroys the clothing that was made for its runners-up. The N.B.A. donates it to an overseas charity.

posted by chrisamiller at 4:40 PM on February 8, 2008

For what it's worth, the year I went to the Superbowl we saw TONS of "YEAH PATRIOTS SUPERBOWL XXXI CHAMPS BOOYEAH" t-shirts for sale on the streets of New Orleans both before and after the game. These may or may not have been counterfeit. I have no idea because I was way too bust getting as happily, deliriously drunk as I have ever been.
posted by dersins at 4:50 PM on February 8, 2008

I had a friends who's Dad worked for a company that produced this merchandise. We always managed to get our hands on some of the "wrong" clothing, but for the most part they donated it to developing countries.


So yea, what chrisamiller said.
posted by zacharyseibert at 4:54 PM on February 8, 2008

You make a shirt or hat for $5. You sell it for $25. Even if you throw away half the inventory, you're still making a killing. And I would assume you don't have to pay licensing fees on the destroyed inventory, which is a sizable savings.
posted by smackfu at 5:47 PM on February 8, 2008

A lot of it is simply destroyed. The company I work for supplies most of the packaging and prepress work for a certain large food processing company. Our client often prints multiple versions of their orange-boxed breakfast cereal and then destroys the "loser's" boxes. It's cheaper to pay for duplicate boxes (design, prepress, plates, printing, etc.) and scrap the "loser" than it is to miss a week's worth of "winner" sales.
posted by nathan_teske at 9:03 PM on February 8, 2008

I used to be a buyer for what's now the largest department store chain in the states, so I saw this a few times a year, on average.

The authoritative answer is: it depends. As mentioned above, actual stuff that's owned / produced by the leagues themselves usually gets either shipped off to 3rd world countries or destroyed (shame).

A lot of stuff, however, is produced by licensed (or sometimes unlicensed, but you have to try to avoid that if you're an ethical buyer, of course) vendors. The problem is that they don't usually want to sit on the stock, they'd rather sell you the whole lot (both team's winning gear) so that you get a) the benefit of having the right team's gear in your stores next day (as opposed for having to wait for the vendor to ship), but you also b) assume the responsibility of disposing of the other half of the product, so the vendor doesn't have to worry about it.

Some of your more upstanding vendors will negotiate to take care of the other half for you, in which case they're most likely going to donate it to an NGO, state-side (so they don't have to pay to have it shipped overseas), pay someone to destroy it, or - if they can really pull a fast one, sell it off to the TJ Maxx's and Ross's of the world - but they'll rarely get away with that if its licensed product.

On a side note, I work in Africa now with an NGO that delivers just this kind of product to people who have basic needs, like T-shirts, for example. When you realize there's people who don't even have stuff like that, you start to see what a shame it is that probably ~50% of this un-sellable product gets incinerated.
posted by allkindsoftime at 9:17 PM on February 8, 2008