The Burberry and football love story

Now the link between football and Burberry is embodied by Son Heung-min. The South Korean striker from Tottenham was chosen by the London-based company as its new brand ambassador in the summer of 2022. A legitimate intuition, considering that Son has built up an image as a fashion icon over the years, is a world-famous footballer who plays in the most important league in the world, the Premier League, and for a London team, Tottenham Hotspur. The surprising thing about this collaboration and the collaboration with Marcus Rashford in 2020 is that Burberry has decided of its own free will to associate its name with the football world, after having gone in the complete opposite direction in previous years.

Burberry and the hooligans

In fact, in the early 2000s, Burberry was synonymous with hooligans and thus the symbol of violence, riots and brawls. The long beige or black coats with the tartan pattern sewn in, the scarves and baseball caps were a must for the chavs, the term used by the British media to describe young people who belonged to a subculture characterized by sportswear and violent behavior, ready to break out into fights. From being synonymous with luxury, Burberry had become a symbol of a popular movement, and it didn't matter if the clothes were real or fake. The tartan was all over the news and became one with the violent culture of the hooligan mentality, a combination so prevalent that some pubs even began banning anyone wearing a Burberry garment from their premises for fear of incidents.

The pursuit of style has always been the main meaning of terrace culture, regardless of which team the various hooligan groups belonged to. Each company had a distinctive feature, a kind of uniform that distinguished its members. And so, at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, Sergio Tacchini sweatshirts and Lacoste items became a must-have in the stands of every stadium, just as Fred Perry polo shirts and Aquascutum coats accompanied the revival of movements in the early 1990s. But none of these garments could compete with the idea of luxury that Burberry conveyed. There was nothing cooler than tartan. This combination was so powerful that it was also reproduced on the big screen with Green Street Hooligans, a 2005 film starring Elijah Wood and Charlie Hunnam, and The Firm, a 2009 film that revived an old BBC production from 1989 starring Gary Oldman.

Rebranding and Kanye West

It took some strong decisions on Burberry's part to erase all traces of this association with the world of hooligans, which in the meantime had lost its central role in the history of English football. To become synonymous with luxury and style again, Burberry first chose Kate Moss as the brand's testimonial, then reinvented part of its production and finally began to target a different, younger and more loyal audience. The result? According to Statista estimates, Burberry has grown from a turnover of £715 million in 2005 to a record £3 billion for the period 2022/2023, figures that the company also confirms in its latest financial report. The association with hooligans may be a thing of the past, but the attempt to reconnect with the football world through the clean image of footballers could bring Burberry back to the stands of stadiums around the world. The new collection, presented by Daniel Lee in London under the watchful eyes of Son, Bukayo Saka, Gareth Bale, Dele Alli and Martin Ødegaard, continues to be the symbol of class, elegance and luxury associated with the British fashion house today.

At the same time, Burberry remains one of the brands most appreciated by stadium visitors because it combines casual style with a certain recognition value. This was also proven by Kanye West, who appeared at the Champions League round of 16 match between Inter Milan and Atletico Madrid at the San Siro on Tuesday wearing a black bomber jacket with the unmistakable blue knight on the side. And immediately afterwards, he recorded a track for his album Vultures 1 that samples the chants of the Nerazzurri curva, originally to be called Hooligans, to illustrate how alive this esthetic remains in the football history even after the end of the organized fan movement. Ultimately, the relationship between football and Burberry really does seem inseparable.