Dhe Bundesliga second division team FC St. Pauli makes his own shirts. The association founded the manufacturer DIIY for this purpose. According to their own statements, this makes them the only manufacturer in professional football that produces the jerseys exclusively sustainably. After two years of planning and negotiations, the fairly produced training collection went on sale in June 2021. The club had long been looking for partners who would be able to produce the shirts to the desired standards; for example, it was about recycled plastic, organic cotton and certified materials.
The club quickly realized that it had to make the jerseys itself, according to the self-chosen motto: “You have to do everything yourself.” This is how the name DIIY came about: Do it Yourself. DIIY is part of Merchandising GmbH; According to Bernd von Geldern, head of the economics department at FC St. Pauli, sales in 2022 were around 2 million euros.
According to him, the costs for sustainable products are around 25 percent higher. However, amounts of money paid to the outfitters of the clubs are now eliminated. That’s why FC St. Pauli can still offer the jerseys at fair prices in its online shop. “Sustainability would also mean not selling any more T-shirts, but we have employed over a hundred people in merchandising who rely on us to be a good employer,” says von Geldern. You also have to earn money in order to be able to replace a larger outfitter contract, according to the DIIY website. An outfitter contract brings in a seven-digit amount for the club, reports von Geldern.
Without gender assignments
Around 60,000 items from the DIIY collection were sold last year. The jerseys were the most important. There are the variants “tailored” and “non-tailored”. The club describes both as “unisex” because it attaches great importance to avoiding gender assignments and encouraging its fans to wear what they find beautiful themselves.
The jerseys are produced as sustainably as possible and have been awarded seals of approval. The “Skull Collection” bears the “GOTS – Global Organic Textile Standard” and “Fairtrade Cotton” seals. In addition, all items that do not meet the minimum standards set by FC St. Pauli are gradually sorted out.
Jackets, trousers and hoodies are also available under the DIIY name. FC St. Pauli employees are occasionally on site to check the working conditions and conditions in the production facilities. In addition to sustainability, fairness in production plays a major role. On its website, the association states that it pays the employees at the individual production sites “wages well above the minimum wage”.
Production also in China
The main production sites are in Turkey and Portugal, only the jackets are made in China because they require a lot of manual work and “production in the Far East is essential if the jackets are to be offered at socially acceptable prices”. The Chinese production facilities also demonstrably adhered to high ecological and social standards. Basically, all fabrics and ingredients come from the respective region. Raw materials that are procured on the world market carry certificates such as “GRS – Global Recycled Standard”.
FC St. Pauli also allows itself to be controlled. To this end, in spring 2021 it was the only football club to join the Fair Wear Foundation. It is checked whether the jerseys are made of at least 50 percent recycled fibers as stated, which the club claims to have achieved almost 100 percent in the first season. In March 2023, FC St. Pauli was rated “Good”. While the association does very well in the area of exchange with other companies, there is still room for improvement in the area of purchasing practices. “A lot of things are going well and correctly from the gut, but so far there has been no systemic approach to making and checking purchasing decisions on the basis of social responsibility,” says the association. In order to implement this requirement in the future, a comprehensive risk analysis is being worked on, among other things.
According to Bernd von Geldern, FC St. Pauli could become a role model for other football clubs with DIIY. He suspects that sustainability will become a core issue in professional football. “It is essential for football clubs to address fans because they are member-managed.”
Von Geldern can also imagine cooperation with other football clubs. He thinks more of smaller clubs than professional clubs because St. Pauli not willing to pay sponsorship money and thus act as an outfitter. Smaller clubs are currently in discussion with DIIY. Among them is the Eimsbütteler Turnverband (ETV), a sports club from Hamburg; he is considering having his kits produced by DIIY from 2025. “Basic factors in our decision-making were on the one hand sustainability and on the other hand the good quality that DIIY guarantees,” reports Jasper Hölscher, coordinator in the field of football at ETV.
Von Geldern sees further environmental problems in professional football: “It’s an ecological shame to only have the stadium for 17 home games a season, because a lot of garbage is produced on the match days and the lawn has to be looked after very intensively.” Every club has to do it so well it is possible to compensate. FC St. Pauli wants to reduce the waste on match days and compensate with the sustainable jerseys. The football club, which is known for its social commitment, also used the first DIIY collection to set a social example: they had the away shirts printed with “No football for the fascists”.
The article is from Student project “Youth and Economy”which the FAZ organizes together with the Federal Association of German Banks.