https://sports.yahoo.com/whats-a-losing-teams-super-bowl-champion-merch-worth-173620700.html
The question hits the air before the confetti hits the ground, before the winning team has stretched their “Super Bowl Champions” t-shirts over shoulder pads: Hey, what happens to the losing team’s merchandise?
Right now, there are boxes and pallets of “Super Bowl Champion Eagles” and “Super Bowl Champion Chiefs” sitting quietly in warehouses and storerooms in New Orleans, Kansas City and Philadelphia, among other locales, just waiting for the clock to hit 0:00 so one can be opened. The losing team’s merch will be packaged up and sent away. Far, far away.
“The products actually get shipped to Eastern Europe,” says Cinira Baldi, CEO of Good360, the organization tasked with handling the NFL’s unsellable merch. “There are multiple countries — Ukraine being one, and Poland, and some other countries — where we make sure that it gets to good hands, people that need the product.”
Good360 specializes in this sort of asset reallocation for charitable purposes; the organization is involved in stateside relief efforts for the Los Angeles wildfires and the Florida and North Carolina hurricane devastation, among other crises. The organization has worked with the NFL for more than a decade to redistribute merchandise to locations in need — everywhere from war zones to disaster zones to impoverished areas.
Where other corporations that work with Good360 may not necessarily worry about specific brand management security, the NFL has very specific concerns and needs regarding its donated merchandise. Cincinnati Bengals Super Bowl champion merchandise from 2022 might be an interesting little collectible, but it dilutes the brand and infects the market with what the NFL sees as defective — or at the very least, improper — merchandise.
Thus, Baldi notes that Good360 carefully vets its nonprofit vendors to ensure that merchandise actually get to their destinations, rather than to less charitable and more opportunistic hands.
“We don’t want to ever ship products that could be resold on the market or where the NFL might be very popular, so bad actors could take them and resell them. We’re very particular about that,” Baldi says. “We want to distribute them where there’s a need, either around having access to clothing and gear, or there’s displacement. So people who’ve been displaced from their homes and don’t have anything. It could be natural disasters or conflict areas.”
(Interesting side note: the hottest item in donations right now is baseball caps. Whether for fashion or utility, ballcaps are now in demand all over the world.)
Thing is, once the merchandise reaches its destination, literally anything can happen to it, including a possible return to U.S. shores. What then? Would anyone pay a premium for a t-shirt of a Super Bowl loser?
Collectibles experts contacted by Yahoo Sports consider that a fairly remote possibility. Fans of the team that lost generally don’t want to be reminded that they came up short. And the value of “wow, that’s kind of weird” merch is pretty limited. It’s on par with, say, a Memphis Allen Iverson jersey from the three games The Answer played for the Grizzlies. Collectors tend to value real-world events over hypothetical ones.
The secondary market seems to bear that theory out. Scout around eBay, and you might find a painfully desperate “Home with the Chrome” San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl LVIII t-shirt for “$14.99 or best offer,” or perhaps a “Super Bowl Champions” 49ers shirt for “$19.97 or best offer.” (The Niners lost Super Bowl LVIII to the Chiefs last year, 25-22.) Or, if you’re a Falcons fan who wishes to deny the existence of literally everything that happened after Atlanta led 28-3 in the Super Bowl, you can pick up a “Champions Falcons” long-sleeved shirt for “$5.18 or best offer.” Authenticity is always a question, but all have NFL holograms or price tags attached.
So if you want to live in that alternative reality, or if you just want a one-of-a-kind collectible, you could see who you know in Eastern Europe. A better idea: keep in mind that whoever is supposed to be getting that shirt or hat probably needs it for something more than just a conversation starter.
https://sports.yahoo.com/whats-a-losing-teams-super-bowl-champion-merch-worth-173620700.html
