Addressing What We Do with the “Championship” Merchandise from a Team That Loses

Ah yes…what a joy it is to see the team you root for get a championship. You can then spend all night cheering, then get merchandise the next morning saying that your team won the Super Bowl, World Series, Stanley Cup, etc. In fact, as I’m writing this, New England Patriots fans are probably still having fun buying merchandise saying that their team won the Super Bowl.

But what about the losing team?

Since there is such a desire to get merchandise to the players, coaches, and fans who won the championship in such short order, said merchandise is usually made, ahead of time, for both of the participants in the championship matchup. That way, all interested parties on the championship team can get their merchandise right after winning.

The “championship” merchandise of the losing team, on the other hand, goes to a different place. At least with many sports, the umbrella sports leagues work with organizations to make sure that the losing team’s merchandise can get to nations with people in need of clothing, such as places like Haiti after their catastrophic 2010 earthquake.[1]

On the surface, that sounds great: instead of destroying merchandise related to the losing team (which the National Football League apparently used to do), it’s repurposed for people in countries who really need the clothes, regardless of what those clothes say. And there’s no doubt that having these misprint clothes is way better than having no clothes at all.

That being said, there’s something off-putting about this practice. Namely, while this practice gives the appearance of helping those in most desperate need, this practice is also sending one or more of the following messages:

1. “This stuff is not good enough for us; therefore, you can have it.”
2. “We don’t want this stuff, so the poor people in poor countries must want this.”
3. “We’ve taken what we wanted, so poor people can have the leftovers/what others didn’t want. Please take our unwanted garbage.”
4. “People won’t know that the information is incorrect, and even if they did know, they wouldn’t care.”

None of the messages above are exactly positive ones, for sure. In fact, all of these messages revolve around a theme: that the developed United States, yet again, decides to use underdeveloped nations as a dumping ground for the “rubbish” that we don’t want.

So what should we do, then? For starters, we shouldn’t have misprint clothing exclusively go to developing nations (with the “correct” clothing only going to developed nations)—the benefits of the correct clothing and the burdens of misprint clothing should at the very least be shared. Additionally, it might be wise for these sports leagues to actually think about how they really want to sacrifice in order to help underdeveloped countries. Because let’s face it: sports leagues don’t sacrifice anything by giving away misprint championship merchandise to a place like Haiti—they don’t sacrifice any profits, they don’t sacrifice a portion or their fan base, and they don’t sacrifice on ticket prices, they don’t sacrifice anything else. However, using money and resources to make sure a child gets an education, gets health care, and gets food might sacrifice something monetarily, but would also do a ton of good.

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[1] https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2017/1/14/14272992/what-happens-to-losing-teams-championsip-shirts