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It all started with 10 football shirts in my garage. Year round, I send parcels of football kit all over the world. They go to several countries in Africa, to refugee camps, to tiny islands in the Pacific – places where football shirts are sought after but impossible to get. But in November 2020, I was left with 10 pristine Manchester United shirts and no home in mind, and that was where the idea of Kitmas was born.
2020 was a bruising year and, with Christmas approaching, many parents were worrying about how to provide presents for their children. I decided to take the shirts to my local food bank in Stroud and see if they would be useful.
When I mentioned this idea to my brother, comedian Mark Watson, he tweeted to see if any others wanted to contribute their pre-loved shirts to the cause. The response was immediate and heart-warming, so we also set up a Crowdfunder page for anyone who didn’t have a shirt to offer but wanted to buy one for a child.
Soon, Kitmas took on a life of its own. Weary delivery drivers were arriving at all hours, the postman became a good friend (fortunately, as he had to perform Herculean acts of strength to bring the parcels down our steps).
Luckily, my wife Lizzie is a master of organising projects. While I could spot a Sevilla away shirt from 100 metres, she could create spreadsheets that told us exactly how many shirts were needed at each centre. Meanwhile, my friend, stand-up comedian and PR guru, Vix Leyton, joined the team and created the media attention that kept the donations flooding in.
By Christmas Day in 2020, we’d donated 1,000 shirts to community groups around the UK. In 2021, we sent just over 2,000 shirts to 22 community centres, from Belfast to Burnley.
This year, sadly, the demand is greater than ever before. The cost of living crisis has hit families hard and the centres we work with are all reporting unprecedented requests for help.
Some football clubs have joined Kitmas. Bristol City, Forest Green Rovers, Cheltenham Town, Exeter City and Frome Town raised money and donated shirts in their communities last year. But most of the elite football world is ever more divorced from its fans.
The Qatar World Cup and a climate where Premier League clubs can now be owned by entire states and faceless business syndicates means football is more and more detached from its supporters.
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An England shirt for a child retails at £60. Often Premier League shirts are more expensive than that, sometimes near the £100 mark for a new kit.
When one in six households in the UK are in “serious financial difficulty”, these kinds of prices – which are largely dictated by the manufacturers such as Nike and Adidas – are clearly ludicrous. But while it has become increasingly impossible to afford a child’s football shirt, the pressure to be seen in the right shirt just continues to grow. This puts parents in an impossible position, especially at Christmas.
The late Jock Stein once said: “Football without fans is nothing.” It’s time clubs considered whether pricing children out of wearing their shirts and heaping financial pressure on struggling parents is really the best way to treat their fans.
Paul Watson is a football coach and activist
Kitmas hopes to brighten the Christmas of many children in the UK, collecting and distributing football shirts to kids who may not otherwise receive presents this year. You can get involved here
