Global soccer has a brand-new pitch. On Monday, just after the opening weekend of the Club World Cup, FIFA unveiled its latest innovation: a “functional luxury” fashion line for men and women called FIFA 1904.
Yes, the governing body of soccer is starting a clothing line. And not one featuring T-shirts and hoodies but, rather, cashmere overcoats, sheath dresses and crisp office-appropriate shirts and tailored blazers.
Put another way: The suits are selling suits. Whether it is the next step in the increasingly intertwined relationship between fashion and sport or an own goal remains to be seen.
Introduced at a starry dinner in Los Angeles where the actors Tiffany Haddish and Matt Bomer and the model Alton Mason schmoozed with the former soccer players Javier Pastore and Juan Pablo Angel, FIFA 1904 was created in collaboration with the masterminds of VFiles, the edgy fashion-music-pop-culture platform.
While plenty of soccer clubs have their own brands — even their own expensive brands — including Paris Saint-Germain and AC Milan, and plenty of clubs team up with luxury labels to offer clothes their players wear off the pitch (last week, Louis Vuitton announced it had signed a partnership with Real Madrid to dress the team “for major travel and events”), this is the first time that a league has taken a page from the playbook.
“I think it can be a billion-dollar brand by the 2030 World Cup,” said Julie Anne Quay, the founder of VFiles, who cooked up the idea for the line with the VFiles chief executive Leonardo Lawson, formerly of Yeezy, and sold it to FIFA.
Ms. Quay, who is also an owner of the British soccer club Barnsley F.C., got the idea for FIFA 1904 while on trips with soccer executives to Qatar (where the 2022 World Cup was held) and Saudi Arabia (which will host the 2034 World Cup). She was struck by the fact that even the executives were, she said, “incredibly dressed.”
“They travel with multiple trunks of luggage,” she said. “They speak multiple languages. They’re sitting at the most important tables in government as well as sport.” She recalled thinking, “You guys are a walking brand.”
She had been mulling over the next incarnation of VFiles for a while, and this, she thought, could be it. At first, the FIFA executives were skeptical — they already had a merchandising deal with Adidas — but they soon saw the potential.
“We were looking for ways to diversify our approach,” said Romy Gai, the chief business officer of FIFA. “To move outside our natural borders and capitalize on the value of our brand that is more than 120 years old.”
Ms. Quay made them realize they were thinking too literally. They were, Mr. Gai said, “concentrating on the actual game on the pitch” at a time when other leagues were cottoning on to the way fashion had invaded their space — a time when the N.B.A. was thinking about how to brand the tunnel walk and F1 was connecting with Louis Vuitton. Even Ferrari had started its own fashion brand, currently shown on the Milan catwalk.
The new brand, which is based in New York and Los Angeles (as opposed to Switzerland, where FIFA is based but which is not exactly a hotbed of hipness), will be designed by Marcus Clayton, the former design director of Fenty, Rihanna’s short-lived fashion line. FIFA, which is a nonprofit, will license its name and logo to VFiles and get a royalty of sales in return, as well as the right to approve each design. The idea is for the designs to connect to what happens on the pitch, whether with a silhouette borrowed from the shell suits that players wear to warm up or seams that curve like the ball itself.
The line will be shown during the men’s wear shows in Paris later this month. Afterward, the plan is to transform the VFiles store in SoHo into the FIFA 1904 flagship store, start with 10 wholesale partners and hold a proper runway show next year. Prices will range from $55 for a cap to $995 for a cashmere blend overcoat.
David Goldblatt, the author of “The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football,” saw a certain abstract logic in the venture.
“Over the last 10 years, Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, has aligned the organization, increasingly, with the global superrich,” he said, pointing out that it was under Mr. Infantino’s leadership that the World Cup went to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 (and will go to Saudi Arabia). “The elites of those countries also comprise a very big chunk of the global luxury market. So if they’re buying five-star hospitality for games, why wouldn’t they buy the luxury shirt to show they’ve been there?”
The problem, Mr. Goldblatt said, is that they are not the only soccer consumers. In fact, they are not even the primary soccer consumers. Soccer, alternatively known as “the beautiful game” and “the world’s game,” is mythical partly because it is so accessible. It does not discriminate by class, economic status or geography. Its appeal is, in many ways, antithetical to the appeal of luxury, which is premised on exclusion and elitism.
“Football administrators and the football world trade enormously on the notion that football, almost uniquely among sports, almost uniquely among cultural phenomena, is truly universal,” Mr. Goldblatt said.
And though soccer’s billions of fans around the world obsessively follow their favorite club or player, their loyalty tends to be to the team or person, not to the sport’s faceless governing body. Especially a governing body that was previously most famous for a video game created under license by EA Sports, a partnership FIFA dissolved in 2022. Not to mention the 2015 bribery and corruption scandal that caused the resignation of Mr. Infantino’s predecessor, as well as numerous arrests and indictments. (And some claim it never fully reformed). FIFA may have been founded in 1904, but simply having a heritage does not mean it is a luxury heritage.
“The main brand identity is as perhaps the world’s worst governed and corrupt global sporting institution,” Mr. Goldblatt said.
Not surprisingly, Ms. Quay disagrees. “When you travel the world and start talking about FIFA, it’s a whole other ballgame,” she said. “It means hope, it means passion, it means commitment. FIFA is not like the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or M.L.B. It’s next level globally.”
But it’s also a faceless abstraction. Which suggests that to make its fashion line take off, FIFA (and Ms. Quay) will have to enlist the players and coaches, the actual people other people may want to emulate, as models. Given how many famous athletes already have deals with specific brands — ones that most likely prohibit promoting another brand — that could be complicated.
Still, Ms. Quay believes so much in the project’s potential that she and Mr. Lawson have created a new entity, VFiles Unlimited, which will become the parent company of a suite of brands: FIFA 1904; a second brand that will be introduced with a soccer club yet to be announced (“Let’s just say it has one of the biggest fan bases in the world,” Ms. Quay said.); a brand with a musical artist yet to be revealed; and VFiles Uniform, which is “on-set workwear for the new generation of young creatives,” or what to wear to a photo shoot, a video, a film, a concert.
“Fashion, music, sport — they’re the global ways we communicate,” Ms. Quay said. In one way, at least, Mr. Goldblatt agrees. FIFA 1904 is, he suggested, well-suited for the entertainment world.
“It’s made for John Oliver,” he said. But he was talking about the talk-show host’s satire, not his wardrobe.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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