Hitachi Vodafone Huawei

September 25, 2022 7:33 PM

A timeline of the tech sector through football shirts. "Believe it or not, Samsung Mobile was a small player in the world of handsets when their deal began with Chelsea in 2005."
posted by spamandkimchi (5 comments total)

Looked for crypto in the most recent entries, was not disappointed.
posted by meowzilla at 11:40 PM on September 25, 2022

Looked for crypto in the most recent entries, was not disappointed.

A marriage made in money-laundering heaven.
posted by chavenet at 1:47 AM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

The biggest eyesore for me as shirt sponsors are the gambling companies, and many of them are extremely dubious. Philippe Auclair wrote an article in Josimar about a particularly bizarre story earlier this year.
posted by Kattullus at 3:18 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I once was walking around downtown-ish Seattle and there were hundreds of people wearing green Xbox jerseys everywhere I looked. I remarked to my companions that there must have been a big Microsoft product launch or some other corporate event at one of the stadiums. It took me a year or two to realize that in fact they were soccer fans. Not being a sports fan, there is still nothing about those jerseys that communicates "soccer" to me; I guess my only other reference point at the time was basketball or baseball jerseys that I think always have the team name biggest on the front.

And I had a Mexican friend often wore her favorite Mexican team's jersey around Boston. The first time I saw her wearing a shirt with the huge word "bimbo" on it, I did a double-take. If I remember, she didn't know the slang term, and I certainly didn't know the bread brand. Looking at wikipedia now, apparently the name was coined by combining "bingo" and "Bambi," hoping to attach innocent, childlike associations with the brand.
posted by msbrauer at 12:32 PM on September 26, 2022

When AIG was exploding and we all thought we were on the verge of the next Great Depression, I remember walking around San Francisco and trying not to think about how freaked out everybody seemed to be. Anyway, I immediately and inevitably encountered someone wearing a Manchester United AIG shirt -- this was a couple of days into AIG being at the top of every headline, so I figured the guy just had a perverse sense of humor.

(I'm not a huge purchaser of sports memorabilia, but every part of my body recoils at buying a sports shirt that is covered with advertisements. I'm an American millennial, so I've been advertised to at every moment of my life since grade school at least....except for on sports jerseys! It's our only reprieve.)
posted by grandiloquiet at 4:02 PM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]