Shirt swapping or jersey swapping is a tradition in sports where players of opposing teams swap jerseys with each other at the end of a match as a sign of mutual respect.
Shirt swapping is a long-held tradition in association football.
The first shirt swap is believed to have taken place at a match between France and England on May 14, 1931; the French team lost and asked to keep the English team's shirts as a memento.[1] [2]
A further example took place at the 1954 FIFA World Cup.[2]
In the 1970 FIFA World Cup, Pelé and Bobby Moore swapped shirts.[1] [3] Following this, the tradition spread to other individual players.[4]
Jersey swapping also occurs in the National Football League,[5] where it has become common since the mid-2010s, getting the tradition from association football.[6] [7]
During his final season in the National Basketball Association in 2018–19, basketball player Dwyane Wade exchanged jerseys after every game with a player on the opposing team.[8]
Jersey swapping has also occurred in Major League Baseball.[9] [10] Joe Kelly swapped his jersey with a Mariachi musician for his charro jacket in celebration of his Mexican heritage and wore it to the Los Angeles Dodgers' championship trip to the White House following their victory in the 2020 World Series.[11]
In Australian rules football, guernsey swapping was common in grand finals from as early as the 1940s until around the 1980s.[12] [13] [14] In the Victorian Football League, this infamously meant that photographs of St Kilda celebrating its only premiership in 1966 featured captain Darrel Baldock hoisting the trophy wearing a Collingwood guernsey; St Kilda later doctored the photo to put him back in a St Kilda guernsey in murals and promotional material it created with the image. The VFL banned the captains from swapping guernseys after 1966,[15] and the custom ultimately fell out of vogue. Decades later, long-retired players often handed swapped guernseys back to their original wearers.[16]
Politicians sometimes swap shirts as acts of diplomacy, often before their respective teams play against each other. One instance was Boris Johnson swapping national team jerseys with Juan Carlos Varela before their countries faced each other in the 2018 FIFA World Cup.[17]
| Competition | Matches | Players | Description | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1966 VFL Season | 1966 VFL Grand Final | Collingwood vs St Kilda | As of 2024, the 1966 premiership is St Kilda's only VFL/AFL premiership, and there is an infamous photo of St Kilda's Darrel Baldock raising the premiership cup wearing Collingwood's Des Tuddenham's guernsey.[18] | |||
| 1970 FIFA World Cup | Group stage | Brazil vs England | Pelé | Bobby Moore | Regarded as a symbol of fair play in association football. | |
| 2022 FIFA World Cup | Round of 16 | Argentina vs Australia | Lionel Messi | Cameron Devlin | Shirt worn in Messi's 1000th match[19] | |