5/18/2023 0 Comments Fanatical football reviewLeagues parceled out their most precious licenses to brands like Nike and Adidas, which mostly seemed concerned with using on-field uniforms as marketing tools, rather than with producing gear for fans.Īt that point, Mr. The largest portion of that, 28.1 percent, was apparel.īut after a jersey and T-shirt craze in the 1990s, demand flattened. According to the International Licensing Industry Merchandisers Association, global retail sales of licensed sports merchandise reached $25 billion in 2016. Rubin interjected, “I was at work Saturday morning.” Rubin’s chief of staff, said during an interview at the company’s offices in this Philadelphia suburb on a recent afternoon. “We sold the company on a Friday and we were at work again on Monday morning,” Saj Cherian, Mr. Rubin liked the business so much that he bought it and two other consumer-oriented properties back from eBay, combining them into a company called Kynetic. Rubin, 45, got into the industry as a 12-year-old selling ski equipment out of his parents’ basement in nearby Lafayette Hill.Īmong G.S.I.’s properties was Fanatics, which had started in 1995 as a single brick-and-mortar store in a mall in Jacksonville, Fla. ![]() “Amazon is an incredible company,” he said, “but we have 5,000 full-time employees that go to bed and wake up thinking about the licensed sports business.” Rubin sounds like he does not see that as much of a threat. Rubin said that his company’s licensing deals, which run from 13 to 17 years long with each of the four major professional sports leagues, are exclusive enough that “somebody can’t be a significant player without the rights that we possess.”Īmazon sells and ships team-branded products from some licensed vendors and through its third-party marketplace. “If you’re selling the same merchandise that’s commonly available, and you’ve got no point of differentiation, you’re dead,” Mr. The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has also taken a stake. It’s also a timely reminder that players, managers and chairman may come and go (particularly at Elland Road at the moment), but the one constant are the supporters and especially those like Gary Edwards.The strategy has attracted a $1 billion investment from the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. It’s an honest account of the experiences that every football supporter will endure during a lifetime of following any club. On one occasion the coffin was stolen and dumped in a local pub – Edwards turned up at Leeds police station’s lost property department to retrieve it dressed in funereal top hat and tails.Īs the above examples suggest, Fanatical is not an attempt to intellectualise the game or explain the nature of fandom. He also used to travel to games in a hearse christened “Doombuggy” ferrying around an empty coffin. Edwards is an eccentric – a painter and decorator by trade, his hatred of Manchester United runs so deep that he refuses to use the colour red and will even remove it for free. ![]() ![]() (In response to intimidation from Galatasaray fans who famously greeted away supporters with banners bearing the words “Welcome to hell”, Edwards created a poster that read “Hello hell, we’re Leeds”.)Īs well as charting the club’s highs and lows, Fanatical also provides an insight into what sort of character becomes a die-hard fan. For the latter, there is an account of the numerous times the club have fallen foul of bad refereeing decisions and, more seriously, the deaths of two Leeds supporters in Turkey. The former includes his various ways of getting into the home end at away matches, such as sneaking through the hospitality section at the Bernabéu and running around the edge of the pitch after losing his match ticket and wallet (miraculously the wallet and its contents were handed back to him at half time having been passed through the crowd). In addition to detailing a vanished era of “football special” trains, piping hot plastic cups of Oxo sipped on the terraces and an orange ball being hoofed around a badly chewed up pitch, Edwards’ book is filled with humour and tragedy. At Leeds United the custodian of the title of “superfan” is Gary Edwards, who hasn’t missed a competitive game home and away since January 1968 – in fact, in the last 46 years he’s only failed to see one pre-season friendly and that was due to an air traffic control strike which stopped him flying to Toronto.Įdwards’ unstinting dedication to the club is documented in Fanatical which charts Leeds’ modern history, from the heyday under Don Revie, through the hooligan-fuelled 1980s and the heights scaled in the 1990s, before the collapse around the new millennium that culminated in relegation to League One. Everpresent since 1968 – an incredible journeyĮvery club has single-minded fans who are prepared to follow their team everywhere through thick and thin.
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