Inside the Factories Paying Under £1 an Hour to Make Official Football Shirts

Every season, millions of fans buy a club shirt that carries the crest, the sponsor and a price tag that can easily top £90. A new BBC Sport investigation asks who actually gets paid for making them. Its answer is uncomfortable: official football shirts are being produced in Cambodian factories where workers earn less than £1 an hour.

The reporting follows the production chain from the kit on the shop shelf back to the factories where the garments are sewn. It shows how far the people doing the physical work sit from the commercial value attached to the badge and the brand. The gap between what a replica shirt sells for and what its makers take home is the central tension of the story.

Cambodia's garment sector is one of the country's largest employers, and it has long drawn attention from labour rights groups over pay levels and working conditions. Low hourly rates are not unusual across the sector, but the investigation puts the spotlight on a product that is sold as a symbol of loyalty and community, which makes the disconnect harder to ignore.

The story is likely to put pressure on clubs, kit manufacturers and retailers to explain how their supplier codes of conduct work in practice, and whether they include enforceable wage standards. Fans who have long accepted high prices as the cost of following their team may now ask a sharper question: where does the money go? The answer will matter to the sport's commercial partners as much as to the people stitching the shirts.