on message

29.10.2013

 

The plethora of messages on T-shirts ion football these days are not just limited to the once scrawled felt tip pen ones that players wrote themselves on a vest under their playing strip.  Today, there are T-shirts being worn prior to matches in kick warm-ups, which are frankly becoming less of a message than 'just another campaign'.

We are reaching overload and while the FA's 150th Birthday celebrations were the latest ones to be paraded across the chests of the Premier League (and Football League) players, the impact of worthwhile causes are often lost, with it being another in a long line of slogans that have long faded into obscurity.

The "Get To Know Cancer" awareness campaign was a recent one that Spurs have supported, but the T-shirts that attracted the most recent attention were for all the wrong reasons.

The Liverpool players wearing T-shirts in support of guilty of racist abuse Luis Suarez caused a furore, with manager Kenny Dalglish seemingly thinking this was the best way out of a bad situation.  And similarly, the row over the wearing or non-wearing of "Kick It Out" T-shirts by black players brought headlines and the spotlight on a cause for the reasons the T-shirts had not intended.

MEHSTG has previously highlighted the emotional overload brought on by minutes silences for a wide range of reasons and it looks as if T-shirts will go the same way.

There will not be a massive backlash against them, but the purpose of them, however well intended, might fall on unreceptive eyes, just like the clever advertising on television, where you remember the ad, but not what it was for.

 

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