Bringing Fashion to Fantasy Football

Noticing a gap in the market for creative team kits – while also seeing a direct correlation between football jersey design and specific clubs’ history – Icarus FC’s mission is to produce unique kits for teams globally that reflect the character and culture of a club’s hometown. The brand has made imagined historical-concept jerseys (including for FC Stroitel Pripyat and Londinium FC) in the past, but the Hellenic League of Champions collection builds on this idea in a major way.

Based on the Hellenic League – another name for ancient Greece’s League of Corinth – the fantasy football league is made up of 24 teams that correspond to ancient Greek states and cities, including Sparta, Massalia and even the Underworld. The super-original shirts wouldn’t look out of place on the Premier League field (or perhaps more accurately, on street-style stars or in high-fashion sportswear collabs), and the tradition-rooted designs reference specific local histories and myths right down to the club crests and sponsors.

Customers have the option to buy match issue shirts, which bear the name of a player from the team; in this case, the name of a historical or mythological figure associated with a particular Grecian city, like Leonidas for Sparta or Cadmus for Thebes.

The collection is accompanied by a matchday programme, which provides in-depth information about the founding myth, folklore and culture of each club, as well as the league itself, and makes sure to envision a final explosive on-pitch showdown between famous Trojan War rivals Troy City and Mycenae. Furthermore, the campaign imagery sees the jerseys photographed against the backdrop of their modern-day Grecian hometowns.

This concept, as well as the brand itself, are wholly in line with the tastes and values of our Open-Source Sports cohort from Youth Style Collectives 2024, who thrive on fresh, mashed-up and often outsourced interpretations of fashion-focused sportswear and team merch, whether they’re fans or not – especially if heritage, lore and tradition play an integral part in the product output.

Just look at the merch-led (and locality-centric) success of real-life football clubs Venezia FC (read The Brief) and Athens Kallithea FC. Both have worked with Italian sportswear brand Kappa and German design studio Bureau Borsche to produce their jerseys. Athens Kallithea FC’s jersey bears the logo of its sponsor, the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, which marks the first partnership between a professional club and an arts institution while also being the latest museum and apparel crossover. Elsewhere, brands like Le Père (US), Bene Culture (UK) and Pellador FC (Ireland) take visual cues from football kits and adapt them into more sartorial pieces. For further case studies and insights, read Sports & Active Trends to Watch.

The extensive mythology and world-building at play here feels right at home in fashion’s current culture-dominated landscape, which sees luxury brands adopt everything from sportswear design codes to highbrow literary references (read Luxury Fashion’s Cultural Pivot).

This is an important lesson for brands as sportswear and merch become everyday staples for myriads of young consumer cohorts. While partnerships with activewear brands and professional teams are a great place to start exploring this lucrative market, there are opportunities in playing with sportswear’s design codes and experimenting with creative concepts and fashion-first collections. Icarus FC’s capsule is a hugely exciting experimental taster of how sportswear will develop in the coming years.