Shirt sales landmark reached. We’ve sold 20,000 of our away shirt. It’s an amazing, but unexpected achievement.

Five and a half years ago, Clapton CFC reached out to its members for an away shirt design. We received many entries and after several voting rounds, the members chose the winning shirt. THAT shirt.. aka as the ‘No Pasaran’ shirt, which is still our away shirt six seasons on.

The design was created to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War, using the colours from the flag of the Spanish Republic and the three pointed star of the International Brigades who travelled to Spain to fight fascism. Though they were ultimately unsuccessful, they will always be remembered.

Some people may remember the home and away shirts launch at the Deviant & Dandy bar in Hackney on a balmy night in July 2018. We started ambitiously by producing 30 shirts for sale and they sold out immediately on the night. After rumblings we put pre-orders online and expected to sell somewhere in between 100 and 300.

What happened next is stuff of folklore which will be remembered for many, many years.

Our team wore the away shirt at a friendly match, we tweeted a couple of mobile phone photos including the one at the top of this page, and a journalist based in Spain tweeted a photo.

Then the whirlwind started. The sales online started slowly and then picked up speed until we hit a VAT threshold. After much agonising, we registered and sales kept going up. Eventually we stopped at 5k. We were worried people would not receive their shirts for many months and couldn’t handle any more emails and the admin. Then we sent the order to Maurizio at Rage Sport in Italy to manufacture. He may not have slept for a couple of months.

In the meantime, our email was overrun by enquiries so we set up a waiting list. We managed to clear the initial 5k orders and then opened the online store again in Jan 2019. And whoosh, we sold £148k worth of shirts in one day. Eventually we caught up with orders.

Since 2018, we’ve shipped over 18k shirts to 61 countries, with 45% going to Spain – that’s over 8k! Added to the sales at our merch stalls, we’ve hit 20,000 shirt sales.

Our aim was to have an affordable shirt and keep any profit to a modest £10 maximum. Club volunteers have worked tirelessly since 2018 to help keep costs low. That has helped us keep the same price for the shirt of £25 (plus any sales taxes).

Thanks to everyone who helped us hit the this landmark. The shirts remain on sale and it will be up to members to decide whether we continue to wear the shirt or retire it at some point. What do you think? Let us know!