Spotting Fake Shirts - Nike and Adidas

Hey guys, just trialling something different. Thought I’d go over spotting fake shirts, it’s something I get asked about pretty often, so think it could be useful to put out a few wee posts about how to legit check your shirt.

We’ll start with Nike and Adidas, the 2 biggest players in the game really. Recent season bits from these 2 are extremely easy to tell, regardless of if they are brand new with tags, or second hand.

Nike:

Nike introduced product codes in the early 00s, and they’ve made ‘legit checking’ a shirt 10x easier, specially for the average punter, who might not have the knowledge that a dedicated seller would have.
Under the bottom label will be a smaller tag - which will have a short product code on it, let’s use the example ‘BR0778’ - Google this, and you’ll find an exact match - in this instance, a Brighton 2020-21 Home Shirt.

Now, had that code been attached to a different shirt, then we would know it to be fake, since the search result clearly shows it should be attached to a Brighton shirt. Simple!

Adidas

This again follows a similar trend, but this time the product code is at the neck, try code ‘X23803’ - it’ll return a Benfica 2012 Home shirt, so we know that to be legit.

Now, if a code returns multiple shirts, or obviously a complete different shirt to the one you’d expect, then it’s obviously a fake!

Adidas also used product codes in the early 00s, but these would be attached lower down the shirt, beside the bottom label. It’s the exact same process however.