Football-Core
It’s not just a tournament. It’s about belonging, a patchwork, a movement, a thousand remixed kits spinning through fan parks and fashion feeds. Find out why at UEFA Women’s Euro 2025, football-core is taking centre stage.
By Kaz C
You can always tell where football is heading by looking at what people wear when they’re not watching it. At Glastonbury this year, football shirts were everywhere. In the crowds. In the campsites. Paired with sequins, boots and baggy denim. Not just team kits, but stitched, scuffed, reworked versions that said as much about the wearer as they did about the game. Even Glastonbury itself had its own official football shirt. Released in partnership with adidas, the shirt featured a swirling multicolour graphic inspired by the festival site, with a bespoke Glastonbury crest replacing a club badge. It sold out within hours. This wasn’t about allegiance. It was about identity.
Across Europe this summer, that feeling is everywhere. In fan parks, fashion shoots, sweaty clubs and social feeds, women’s football is no longer just something to support. It is something to wear, remix, reimagine and live inside. And the UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 is right at the centre of it.
Yes, there are sixteen teams battling it out across eight Swiss cities, and yes, the football itself will be brilliant. But what’s happening off the pitch tells us just as much about the state of the game. Shirts are selling out before kick-off. Vintage kits are being hacked into halternecks. Fans are finding themselves in the fabric as much as in the fixtures. Football-core is not a sideshow. It has become a symbol of what this sport now means and who gets to shape it.
This is not just about women wearing football shirts. It is about women taking ownership of football’s culture, aesthetics and energy. It is about designers, artists and fans refusing to wait for the industry to catch up. It is about building a football world that looks and feels like the people who actually love it.
And it is telling us something important. Women’s football is not following the old rules. It is writing new ones, and people everywhere are dressing for the part.
Football-core didn’t appear out of nowhere. It emerged in the space that women’s football created simply by not being weighed down by the same history as the men’s game. While traditional fan culture in men’s football has been shaped by decades of hyper-commercialisation and rigid norms, the women’s game arrived with fewer assumptions and more blank space. Shirts were not just signs of allegiance. They were canvases. For many fans, especially younger women and queer communities, that space has been an invitation to make the culture theirs.
In a previous piece for Glorious (read here), embroidery artist Nicole Chui described her practice as deliberately messy and emotionally honest. “I think there’s space in football culture for people to be more vulnerable, more experimental, and just show more of their personality,” she told us. Her stitched-over shirts, created in collaboration with Baesianz FC, don’t follow official lines. They cross them out, loop over them, build something new. It’s that spirit – disruptive, personal, full of feeling – that is powering football-core this summer.
This isn’t just happening on the fringes. The kits worn by players at the Euros have been some of the boldest yet. Germany’s cherry red and forest green away kit, designed by adidas, has already become a cult favourite. Nike’s ranges for France and Portugal have pulled from fashion silhouettes as much as football tradition. Denmark’s tournament kit, designed in collaboration with ROTATE Birger Christensen, shows just how far the shift has gone. The Copenhagen-based fashion label is known for its playful tailoring, oversized collars and partywear sensibility. Their take on the national team’s look has blurred the line between sportswear and runway, drawing headlines in both fashion and football media. It’s not just a stylish kit. It’s a statement about how Denmark sees its team, and how women’s football is redefining what national identity looks like on the pitch.
That idea of the shirt as identity, not just uniform, is shaping how fans experience Euro 2025. In host cities like Basel and Bern, shirt customisation stalls are popping up next to beer tents and fan zones. Scarves are sold alongside nail stickers. People are not just buying kits. They are altering them, personalising them, wearing them with intent. On TikTok, the hashtag #footballcore has passed 20 million views, as fans share everything from embroidered classics to upcycled training tops turned into skirts and co-ords. Vintage football shops across Switzerland have reported stronger demand for past women’s kits than men’s.
rewritten
This is not just about aesthetics. It is about ownership. Fans are claiming their place through what they wear, and how they wear it. Art of Football, a UK-based label known for blending football heritage with street culture, has seen surging demand for its women’s merchandise collections in the build-up to the tournament. Their designs, built around past Euros imagery and fan expression, have become part of how supporters show up- not just to matches, but to parties, protests and everyday life. The pieces look like football, but they also look like art, and that balance has helped the brand grow a loyal following far beyond traditional supporters.
In London, designer Sophie Hird has taken the idea even further. Her one-off garments, cut from replica shirts and sewn into sculptural silhouettes, challenge the idea that fanwear has to be functional. In a recent piece for Orlando Pride, she reimagined a football shirt through a western-inspired lens, complete with pleats and panelling. Her work speaks to people who grew up with football but never saw themselves in the merch racks. Newer brands like MadebyMay are following suit, offering drops that combine bold design with a clear-eyed focus on women and fans of marginalised genders. These aren’t licensed kits. They’re statements of belonging.
The creative momentum around these designers isn’t just influencing what fans wear. It is shaping the emotional texture of the tournament itself. You can see it in the queues at shirt pop-ups. You can feel it in the way people talk about kits the way others talk about music or film. This isn’t a style movement orbiting football. It is part of football. It is helping define what the Euros feel like for the people who have been here long before the sponsors showed up.
And yet, the commercial world is still struggling to keep up. A 2024 study by Havas Media Network found that while over 40 million people in the UK now follow women’s sport, a third of them could not name a single sponsor. That gap is not just financial. It reveals a failure to recognise how and why people engage. For too long, marketing in women’s football has defaulted to generic empowerment messaging. What fans are asking for now is something more specific. More stylish. More true to the communities that have been here all along.
We’ve explored this shift at Glorious before. In our feature “Pitch Please: Why Women’s Football Shirts Are Having a Moment,” we looked at how shirts had become cultural currency. Not merchandise, but markers of identity. This summer, the trend has become a movement. The shirt is no longer a souvenir. It’s the start of a story.
At the Euros, you can feel that story playing out in real time. In the way fans in Zurich line up to add patches to their Denmark shirts. In the noise around ROTATE’s design on social media. In the way players wear their kits off the pitch as well as on it. The style of the game is part of how it is watched, remembered and felt.
None of this takes away from what’s happening during the matches themselves. The football has only just started, but already the atmosphere feels electric. We can’t wait to see what unfolds on the pitch, but just as much, we’re ready for everything that surrounds it. To stand in the pub with our friends, drinking celebratory pints and wearing shirts that mean something. To see crowds full of people who look like they belong, singing, styling, taking up space. To feel part of something bigger, louder and more alive than anything a sponsor could dream up. The goals will matter. The drama will matter. But so will the feeling of being there, fully ourselves, dressed for it, ready for it, part of it.
This is what makes Euro 2025 feel different. Not just bigger. Not just louder. But more fully alive to the people who make it what it is. The shirts tell you who someone supports. The way they wear them tells you everything else.
And if the future of football is written in what we wear, then that future is already here.
Are you sporting a shirt this summer? Love them, hate them, stitched your own from scraps? Tell us how you’re wearing the game over on social @glorioussport.
Title image: adidas designed UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 away kits.
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