Buy Football Shirts Quick for a Lasting Memorial – Rooney’s Off!

Breaking news that Wayne Rooney is set to leave Manchester United in the near future has led to a frenzy of late night shirt buying! Fans desperate to buy football shirts with the star’s name and number still blazoned on the familiar scarlet of the Red Devil’s home kit don’t know how much time they have left to do it – which means that Man U shirts showing the England star’s details are likely to be fetching some frankly frightening prices on famous internet auction sites before the month is out. As a result, genuine fans of the player and his club are advised to get their skates on if they want to find anything left by the time the famous roaming striker has packed up his boots and gone off to wherever he is going next.

The first frenzy of fans looking to buy football shirts featuring the playing details of the most famous player of his generation will abate, of course – and we’ll probably find that Ronaldo, as he has been known ever since the day he scored his first ever Premiership goal (on his 16th birthday, no less, and for Everton against the then unbeatable Arsenal), hasn’t left yet. It is, after all, one thing for the mightiest name in British football to announce that he is willing, or wants, to leave one of the mightiest clubs in the land and another for him actually to do it, For one thing, no one knows yet where if anywhere he is being tipped to go. Has anyone made a covert offer for the supremo? If so, fans are going to be equally eager to buy football shirts of an as yet unnamed but probably equally legendary club in the very near future.

Football, of course, is a game of players these days rather than clubs. Younger fans follow their favourite players from club to club with the unfettered enthusiasm of junior chamois, leaping from crag to Alpine crag. That’s wonderful news for the suppliers of football shirts, who will find that sales of any team shirt will double in a week if a player like Rooney steps across to join a new club. It doesn’t matter where in the world that team is situated, either: if Rooney decides to go play in Papua New Guinea, you can bet your bottom dollar that people are going to start to buy football shirts from whatever Papua New Guinean team he happens to grace with his presence.

Is all this good or bad for the game as a whole? It’s neither, really – just evidence of a new reality, a reality where the frequent moving of star players from team to team and country to country has blurred the lines between club and team member. As players are more and more willing to go where their heart desires, so the ways in which the game is followed have started to change: with the net result that new fans are as likely to buy football shirts for a player as they are for a club. It’s still the beautiful game: just a little different.