Nobody owns England
What the World Cup says about the bit of your business nobody’s looking at
Spain beat Argentina on Sunday night. Over the six weeks before that, across forty-eight teams and more than a hundred matches, people bought an astonishing number of shirts. Almost none of them bought from the federation whose badge was on the front.
Argentina's official store is built and run by Fanatics. So is England's. englandstore.com looks like the England store, sounds like the England store, and is run start to finish by Fanatics. Not just the shipping. The range, the buying, the stock, the platform, the site, the lot. The federation takes a royalty and stays out of it.
It isn't a national-team quirk either. France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Argentina all run their federation stores through Fanatics, and so does UEFA for the Euros. Same with PSG. Same with Juventus, Inter and AC Milan. Same with Wembley's retail. Same with a quarter of the clubs in last season's Premier League: Chelsea, Aston Villa, Everton, Leeds and Sunderland. Chelsea have gone further and handed over design and manufacturing too.
That’s a problem for us, because we’ve spent seven articles arguing they’ve all got it wrong.
The awkward bit
If you followed West Park Rovers, you know the argument. Bring it in-house. Own the stack, own the relationship, stop letting a third party sit between you and the people who love your club. We showed the operational reality, the expiring catalogue, the letters and numbers nobody counts, and we finished on the fan graph, which is the whole reason to do any of it.
We stand by all of it. But look at who’s actually renting.
These aren’t clubs that couldn’t afford the alternative. PSG could buy a warehouse before lunch. The FA is not short of a few quid. These are some of the largest, richest, most commercially sophisticated sports organisations on earth, and they have all looked at running their own commerce operation and said no thanks.
Two different things are going on there, and only one of them is defensible.
You can’t grow into a World Cup
Start with the defensible one.
The barrier to running your own store was never the technology. Shopify solved the website years ago. Anyone can be selling by Friday. The hard part is the operational and merchandising muscle, and the only way to build that is slowly, on small numbers, while nobody’s watching.
Every DTC brand you admire got that runway for free. They were rubbish at forecasting when they were doing forty orders a week, and it didn’t matter, because forty orders a week is a survivable mistake. By the time they were doing forty thousand, they’d made every error once already.
A national team never gets the practice, it’s already fully grown. You cannot put up a website with three shirts on it and say we’re learning, we’ll get there. You need millions of pounds of stock sat in a building before you take a single order, a 3PL that already works, a personalisation line that already works, and a merchandising team that already knows what a good buy looks like, on day one, with the whole world watching.
And a national team's commercial operation matters for six weeks every four years.
The apocalypse, but faster
We wrote a piece called The 12-Month Apocalypse about the thing that makes sports retail structurally horrible: your entire catalogue expires every year. New sponsor, new squad, new competition, and last season’s stock isn’t discounted, it’s dead.
A tournament catalogue doesn't expire in twelve months. It expires the moment you go out. England found that out in the semi-final. Argentina found it out on Sunday. The shirt that was the most wanted garment in the country on Saturday is dead stock by Monday, and no supply chain on earth can turn a run of replicas around fast enough to catch the one week that mattered. Win the whole thing and you get the single exception: Spain's shirt is the only one still worth printing. Everyone else is holding polyester with the wrong names on the back.
Moments, Not Seasons argued that clubs should build the muscle to respond to the unpredictable, because seasonal retail has a calendar and sports retail has a pulse. Fine. But a tournament isn’t a pulse. It’s one beat. No signal you can act on, no second attempt, and the thing you’re forecasting is a penalty shootout.
You can’t build a capability around an event that happens once every four years and lasts a fortnight. You’d be paying to keep a team sharp for 206 weeks of not much so they’re ready for the two that count. Nobody sane does that. You rent it, and you’re right to.
So England gets a pass. Fine.
Chelsea doesn’t
Chelsea play fifty-odd times a year. So do Everton, Leeds and Sunderland. Every year. Forever. That is about as repeatable as commerce gets, and repeatability is the whole argument. When demand comes back next week, every mistake is tuition. Every spike teaches you something about the next one. The muscle you couldn’t build for a tournament, you can absolutely build across a decade of Saturdays.
So we’re not softening the position. In-housing is better long-term. Own the stack, own the relationship, own the data. Seven articles, no change of mind.
The reason it isn’t happening is that nobody at the club is listening, because nobody at the club has ever been asked to.
A football club is judged on one thing, and it isn’t gross margin on a hoodie. Retail is a royalty line that turns up in a spreadsheet once a quarter and never causes an argument. It isn’t underperforming. It’s just not anyone’s job to notice. And the licensing partner is very good at making sure it never becomes anyone’s job, because the moment it does, the deal’s in trouble.
That’s not a strategy. It’s an absence of one, held in place for twenty years by the fact that nothing ever went visibly wrong.
This isn’t a football problem
Every business has an England store.
Some part of the operation that somebody else runs, not because you sat down and did the maths and outsourcing won, but because it ended up that way early on and nobody has reopened it since. The wholesale portal. Marketplace listings. Returns. The B2B side. The international sites you launched in a hurry in 2021.
It’s rarely the bit that’s broken. Broken gets attention. It’s the bit that works fine, earns less than it should, and is run by somebody whose incentives are not yours.
The tell isn’t in the P&L. It’s that you can’t answer a simple question about it without emailing someone and waiting two days. How many of those customers came back? What drove the spike in March? Nobody in your building knows. Somebody in a building you don’t own does, and they’ll tell you next quarter.
The other tell is the terms. The deal was signed when that channel was the ninth biggest thing you did. It’s now the third. The terms haven’t moved, because nothing’s gone wrong, and nothing going wrong is exactly why nobody’s looked.
Not everything outsourced should come back in-house. England’s genuinely shouldn’t. But you should at least be able to say which category yours is in, and whether you’re renting because the maths says rent or because the question has simply never been raised in a room where anyone could act on it.
Most brands can’t answer that. That’s the same failure as the club’s, just with less bunting.
One thing you should never rent
You can outsource the factory. Sometimes you should.
But the last piece in the series was about the fan graph, and that’s where this stops being sensible.
A World Cup generates the most valuable fan dataset a federation will see in a decade. Every shirt sold over those six weeks is a person telling you something. Who they are. What made them act. Whether they came back after 2022 or turned up new last month. For most of the teams in this tournament, all of it was captured inside somebody else's platform.
The stock will be gone by August either way. The names won’t be worth anything by then. But the graph would have been worth something for twenty years.
Rent the operation if the maths says rent. Just don’t hand over the only bit that appreciates.