Predicting the World Cup Using Counterfeit Soccer Shirt Sales

June 8th, 2010 | by: Daryl | View Comments

There are many different ways of predicting who will win the World Cup. You can trust your judgement, go round by round and predict who wins each game until you arrive at a champion, which is how our World Cup Bracket competition works. Or you can try some very complicated and very questionable quantitative analysis, designed to achieve the best PR result for the London branch of your financial firm and declare England the most likely winner.

Or… you can decide the World Cup favourites based on how many fake national team jerseys have been sold in China. Let’s go with the latter method, just for the purposes of this post.

According to a story published on the China Daily website today, over 100,000 fake World Cup national team jerseys have been sold on online auction sites. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of fake jerseys, it’s basically something that looks vaguely like the real thing, but is 100% unofficial, very possibly copyright infringing and almost certainly made of comically cheap material. These are not the real thing. But they’re very popular with people who either don’t know the difference, don’t care, or don’t want to spend the money on a official replica shirt. For example, China Daily claims that the majority of replica shirts being sold online in China cost around 50 Chinese yuan (about $7.32 USD or £5 GBP).

Based on online sales of counterfeit shirts, the 10 most popular teams in China are as follows:

1. Spain
2. Germany
3. England
4. France
5. Argentina
6. Italy
7. Brazil
8. Portugal
9. Netherlands
10. Japan

There’s a certain logic to this. The better teams have the better players, and therefore their shirts sell better. So the better teams should theoretically have the best sales. Alternatively, it’s been suggested that the red and yellow Spain jersey is the one that most closely resembles the red and yellow Chinese flag. But if Spain goes and wins this World Cup then we’ll have watertight proof that pirate football shirt sales are a more reliable predictor or World Cup winners that the quantitative analysis of a major financial firm. Which would explain a lot about why the global economy has spent so long in the toilet lately.

Of course, it should go without saying that all the World Cup jerseys in our store are 100% official and have spent absolutely no time in anyone’s toilet.