The Chernin Group (TCG) has invested $38.5 million into Classic Football Shirts (CFS), a mostly online seller of, as the name suggests, football jerseys.
The outfit was born in 2006, when founders Matthew Dale and Doug Bierton (CEO), struggling to find an original jersey for the West German team of 1990, wondered how many other fans out there were seeking vintage stuff. They began buying “as much stock as possible,” cramming it into a “dingy student house,” and – with a third founder, Gary Bierton – launched an e-commerce website in August of the same year.
The resulting company is headquartered in the British city of Manchester and now operates stores there and in London. A few days ago it opened a temporary store in New York City, with permanent stores to follow there and in Los Angeles.
CFS has been profitable almost from the start and self-funded until now. Customers are buying from more than a hundred countries, while the stock comes from thousands of clubs, countries and players. The company’s “Vault,” with its controls for temperature and no doubt humidity, preserves more than 6,700 unique or match-worn jerseys and “special pieces that are not yet available to the public.”
The investment from TCG is meant to produce a rapid expansion, especially in North America, where interest continues to rise in what the rest of the world calls football. The US in particular, of course, has a considerable and ever-growing population of Hispanic descent. Baseball is big around the Caribbean – in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, for instance – but elsewhere in Latin America football is king.
In keeping with TCG’s participation, Cormac Barry has stepped in as executive chairman at CFS. Barry describes himself as a specialist in e-commerce who over the past 25 years has worked in gambling, travel, fintech and sports. He is the chairman also of the fintech company Sambla Group and was formerly CEO of CarTrawler, a B2B company in car rentals.
