For football clubs there are few more money-spinning merchandising tricks than releasing new replica shirts.
Selling shirts is big business, especially when these shirts are sold around the world, and the 2021/22 season will see Everton and Liverpool wearing new home and away kits, as is the same for most top clubs around Europe.
The price of replica shirts has risen considerably through the years and looking across European football the Premier League compares favourably, albeit still far beyond what many fans would deem a reasonable price.
A study by 888 Sport focused on the price of replica shirts across Europe and found that the Premier League had the lowest average price per standard home shirt, with prices taken from the retail sections of official club websites.
The average price of a Premier League shirt was £58.09, compared to the £70.38 average in Ligue 1, an average of £70.05 in the Bundesliga, £68.07 in Serie A and £64.78 in La Liga.
Everton, whose kits are manufactured by Hummel, had the joint sixth cheapest shirt in the Premier League at £55, with Burnley topping the list with their replica shirt price at £45.
Liverpool, who last year entered into their potentially lucrative multi-year deal with US sporting giant Nike, came out as one of the most expensive in the Premier League at £69.95, joint second with Chelsea and just five pence behind the League's most expensive, Tottenham Hotspur.
Nike were the second most expensive replica shirt provider across European football with an average price of £70.45, behind the most expensive brand of Le Coq Sportif at £73.05, with Macron in third at £69.60.
Liverpool's previous kit supplier, New Balance, were the sixth most expensive brand at £68.73, while Hummel were 14th most expensive with an average price of £55.29 per replica shirt.
Nike's replica shirt pricing was £1.80 higher than their major rival Adidas, who are the kit partners for the likes of Manchester United, and given the nature of Liverpool's incentivised contract with Nike, where 20 per cent of royalties from the sale of licensed club merchandise globally are kicked back to the Reds on top of their £30m per year flat rate fee, it will equate to potentially millions more in revenues.
In terms of the rest of Europe, Barcelona and Italian side Cagliari had the most expensive shirts at £81.64, while Real Madrid, Juventus, AC Milan, Eintracht Frankfurt, Lazio and Lyon, Marseille and Rennes all had a price point of £77.35 to see them second, with Inter, Roma and Bordeaux next at £77.34. Fiorentina had the cheapest shirt in Europe by far at £33.52, their kit manufactured by Kappa.
