Football shirt restoration: The next frontier in the vintage kit market?

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This article is part of our Kitted Out series, an exploration of the impact of soccer kits on culture and fashion.

Last year, Ian Jefferson wrote an email to Bill Henderson, the founder and owner of The Dream Shop.

In the message, Jefferson told Henderson about his father, Jesse Jefferson, an MLB pitcher for eight years between 1973 and 1981. In memory of his dad, who died in 2011, Jefferson asked Henderson, a professional shirt restorer, if he could send a blank, store-bought Baltimore Orioles replica for Henderson to build a copy of the shirt his dad wore when he played for them in 1973.

Henderson did him one better, finding an old match-worn Orioles jersey from his stash, one tattered by years of wear in the pros and minor leagues — and then restoring it with Jefferson’s name and number.

After Jefferson returned photos of him posing in a room full of memorabilia from his dad’s career wearing the shirt, Henderson posted about it to his thousands of followers on Facebook.

A couple of weeks later, Henderson received an email from a shirt collector named Rick Taylor. Taylor had noticed Henderson’s Facebook post and dug out an actual match-worn 1975 Orioles Jesse Jefferson jersey from his collection, which he wanted to gift to the former baseball player’s son. Taylor sent the jersey to Henderson, who restored it and sent it on to Jefferson — another item to add to the room decorated in his father’s memory.

Ian Jefferson shows off his father Jesse’s restored Orioles jersey (Photo: Bill Henderson)

That’s just one of many heartwarming tales Henderson has to tell since retiring as a marketing executive in 2018 to lean into his collection obsession and begin restoring jerseys full-time.

“I’ve become the go-to guy for restoration work,” says Henderson, 63. “I work more hours a day than I used to, but I don’t feel like I work at all.”

The world of commercialised sports shirt restorations is relatively new but it’s a growing and increasingly common way to bring old shirts back to life.

“Restoration broadly encompasses a variety of things related to kits,” says Phil Delves, a community partnerships lead and content creator at Cult Kits. “On one side, you have people or companies who will restore kits to their original state, or try as best as possible to do things like replace sponsors or even just practical construction restoration, such as stitching.

“It can also come from more of a creative angle, where shirts are customised, perhaps in a historical ways or ways which aren’t true to the actual history of the shirt. Maybe they’ll introduce things like a customised sponsor, which is one of the most popular methods. So, for example, taking a current shirt and adding a sponsor logo that was never associated with a team but has some sort of connection.

“That kind of restoration can go as far as completely changing the look of a kit to the point where you could argue that maybe ‘restoration’ isn’t the best word, but I think many people would still consider it restoration. That takes more creative license.”

For many of the same reasons that retro jerseys have become one of football’s most popular subcultures, the shirt restoration market is experiencing a surge.

Whether attached to success or pure aesthetics, most sports fans have jerseys they resonate with — and they’re often unavailable to buy new, very expensive on the second-hand market, or in poor condition. Shirt restorers provide an alternative to spending hundreds by taking old jerseys, replacing names, numbers or sponsors, and repairing material damage.

“After sending my own shirts to be restored, I noticed only one person was doing it and I just thought: ‘I want a bit of that,’” says Oliver James Howitt, founder of OJ’s Football Shirt Restorations.

“I’ve been restoring since around 2021 but after leaving my hospitality career in 2023, football shirts and restorations became my full-time job and I haven’t looked back. It hasn’t come without obstacles but the business has grown quickly, and I’m extremely proud of it.”

Last January, Howitt described the state of his company’s profile as “relatively small”, with a few thousand followers. However, after signing deals with several companies, including Korean textile firm Dae Ha, and around £3,000 in internal investment, OJ’s Football Shirts now has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram and more than 540,000 likes on TikTok.

“I first came across (shirt restorations) through Oliver — I spotted him on Twitter about two years ago,” former Wrexham captain Ben Tozer, who retired in May, tells The Athletic.

“It’s a little bit geeky, I guess, but it was just interesting to see all the retro shirts and watch how they were being restored. I thought it was amazing. Funnily enough, my mum then texted me a picture of an old Swindon (Town) shirt of mine — it was white but it had red marks all over it. She asked if she should bin it, so I said: ‘No, I’ll just contact this guy.’”

At first glance, it’s not difficult to see why Tozer’s mother’s first instinct was to throw it in the bin. The jersey, from Tozer’s first season as a professional, was covered in stains, a consequence of the red dye on the numbers and sponsors running in the years since he wore the shirt in the 2006-07 season. The name and number set were also in poor condition and the front sponsor was smudged.

Described as “one of (his) trickiest restorations to date”, Howitt repaired the jersey completely and Tozer posted it on his social media, one of the first professional football players to publicise their use of a shirt-restorer to bring an old and battered jersey back to life.

In addition to the restoration process, heat press machines allow shirt restorers to overhaul the design of modern shirts. Howitt, for example, has replaced the Standard Chartered sponsor on last season’s Liverpool away jersey with the Carlsberg logo, Liverpool’s shirt sponsor from 1992-2010. He has made similar amendments to Boca Juniors, Manchester City and Inter Milan shirts, among others.

So how do restorers do it?

“Let’s use a ‘modern-to-retro’ sponsor swap as an example,” says Howitt.

“First, I’ll turn the shirt inside out and dab the sponsor sparingly with a VLR (vinyl lift-off remover) on a cotton pad. After letting it sit for 30 seconds, I’ll stretch the garment, peel the sponsor, and rub any excess glue residue with a VLR cotton pad until traces are minimal or vanish. If it doesn’t work initially, I repeat until the desired result is achieved.”

Shirt restoration has particularly strong growth potential in the United Kingdom, where the retro shirt market is primarily a second-hand industry.

Clubs and jersey manufacturers have woken up to the attachment to old shirts in the past decade, with retro jerseys with similar materials and almost identical designs becoming more readily available in club shops. Still, it remains a more fragmented industry than in the United States, where primary jersey design changes are less frequent, and retailers such as Lids and Fanatics provide comprehensive “throwback” collections.

Typically, Howitt charges between £15 and £25 for sponsor amendments and up to £35 for name set repairs. With the retro jersey market developing from niche to mainstream, second-hand stores and online vintage retailers are flooded with jerseys from the 1980s onwards, making your dream (or “grail”) jersey more accessible than ever.

Given that some of the most coveted jerseys in pristine condition from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s regularly demand prices north of £500, there is a danger that some independent sellers could be exploiting the blurred the line between a truly authentic “retro” jersey, featuring its original printing, and the restored market.

The Athletic visited an area of London known for vintage clothes and retro football jersey shopping to test whether this trend had spread from the online market to physical stores. After filtering through hundreds of unaltered jerseys at various stores, we stumbled upon a retro shirt retailer displaying a 2002-04 Manchester United home jersey priced at £150 with a freshly printed “Ronaldo 7” name and number set.

Though it was apparent that, at minimum, the name, number, and sponsor had been altered, a sign reading “all original items” was visible above the shirt rack. When The Athletic asked for confirmation, the customer service representative stated that this was an original without any restorations. After asking for further assurance, the representative messaged the owner, who said the shirt was original, but the names and sponsors had been “reproduced”.

Considering that we spent around an hour visiting several retro shirt sellers to no avail, it might indicate that this is not yet a widespread problem in the industry.

While there is no issue with the restoration process, failing to clarify when a shirt has been restored could be viewed as deceiving customers into purchasing altered jerseys at ‘true’ vintage prices.

The art of shirt restoration is still in its relative infancy in the United Kingdom. But with restorers providing an avenue to refresh an item’s details at an affordable price, it has exciting potential as a sustainable way to spruce up the tattered jersey at the bottom of your drawer.

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Demetrius Robinson)

Kitted Out is part of a partnership with VW Tiguan. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

This news was originally published on this post .

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