Why provide a guide on something as simple as buying a hockey jersey? It isn’t as simple as it might seem. A replica jersey usually starts at around $120, and that’s for a blank one with no names or numbers. Jerseys with names and numbers generally range up more toward $160, and the player/team you want may not always be available. If you want to customize a blank jersey with letters and numbers of your choosing, expect to pay an additional $70 to $100 on top of the blank jersey purchase price. So you can see that buying a jersey can be a significant investment on most budgets.
Also complicating the issue is timeliness. Jerseys can go out of date very fast. Blank jerseys are usually a safer bet, since even if the design changes it likely won’t be by much, and if the design that you have looks good it is still seen as desirable to wear by fans of the team even if it is outdated. Jerseys with names can become irrelevant fast, however, especially in hockey where free agents seem to move around a lot more than they do in other sports. The unsung hero who rises from obscurity to become an MVP in a Stanley Cup game may sell a flurry of jerseys to exuberant fans, only to depart the team mere months later for a lucrative contract elsewhere.
The issue used to be as simple as going to the NHL online shop at shop.nhl.com, or to a local retailer who carried official NHL gear, and shelling out for an “authentic” replica jersey. You paid a premium but you were sure to be getting the highest possible quality and most accurate jersey. Several years ago, however, Reebok took over jersey manufacturing duties for the NHL by buying major supplier CCM, and since then fans have noted a drop in quality. “Official” NHL jerseys now use iron-on patches, numbers and logos where they were stitched on before, and the material is thinner and seems of a lower grade. Yet, they are charging higher prices than they used to, where a few years ago you could get a great quality blank replica jersey for nearly half the price they ask now. There are also some questions regarding Reebok’s labor practices. Around the turn of the century they were just as notorious as Nike in exploiting sweatshop labor in Third World countries to make their products. They seem to have made a commitment to get away from that sort of thing since 2004, at least publically, but in recent years they have been supplied by questionable manufacturers such as the Han-Soll factory in Honduras and Western Factory in Thailand.
The alternative to the “official” jerseys is a broad range of bootlegs, mostly produced in China and Croatia. These are sold pretty openly through both eBay and websites, but the quality is all over the map. They range from being a complete joke that you can’t believe someone would actually try to sell, to actually looking better than the “real” Reebok jerseys! The price on these also tends to run from $30 to $70, making them extremely attractive to fans for whom $200 per jersey is a prohibitive expense.
eBay is usually a bad choice for jerseys. Sometimes you’ll stumble across a higher quality one, but most of the ones seen peddled there are of laughably inferior quality. At best, they’ll have crooked names or patches. Often logos will be out of position, or even totally upside down. Little details will be omitted to save money, for example if a team has a mostly white away jersey but has a strip of color around the neck, they’ll exclude the strip of color and just make it all white material. These are just the minor things – I’ve seen jerseys peddled on eBay that had blatantly wrong misspellings of player names, even had designs that were completely made up by the seller and looked nothing like any real team design at all. The sad thing is I’ve also seen people at games rocking these crappy jerseys.
Among the bootleg websites, it’s hard to tell what their labor practices are since after all it is a bootleg operation. We’ll have to set that moral question aside and just look at quality versus price, it’s up to you to do diligence and decide if you might be supporting exploitation by buying from these sellers.
Jersey101.com seems to be the largest and most organized and carries pretty much all major sports. Hockey jerseys at this site tend to be about $50, and they tend to look the way they are supposed to with only very minor stitching differences. They even outdo the Reebok jerseys a bit by claiming applique twill and fight straps on the back of every jersey! The downside is that they don’t stock all the teams, or all the players on the team. Certain popular teams like the Anaheim Mighty Ducks seem to be completely missing from their roster.
The other knockoff site that gets a lot of attention is borntrade.com, which offers all sorts of sports jerseys for the seemingly impossibly low price of $25 to $40. They also even have hats and knockoff swimwear for women. I haven’t seen forum postings or reviews online yet so I can’t speak to the quality, but the photos look like they stand up pretty well.
Whatever route you choose to go, be sure to compare pictures of real jerseys to pictures of whatever you are buying to be sure that enough matches up to be suitable to wear. Also take a look at a player’s contract and evaluate how long they will realistically be with the team. You can get away with “vintage” jerseys of someone like Wayne Gretzky who established himself with the Oilers before moving on to the Kings, but those situations are pretty few and far between.
