Will Morgan was furloughed during Covid-19 from his job as a civil engineer and started making football shirts for his team Rogerstone and turn it into a booming business
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When Will Morgan was furloughed from a job he loved as a civil engineer he knew he was in for a gruelling period.
Coronavirus had just arrived in Britain and was spreading rapidly, people were confined to their own four walls, and for many – Will included – there was very little to keep them occupied.
The 27-year-old football fanatic from Newport couldn’t even rely on the beautiful game to take his mind off things – another cruel victim of the pandemic at the time as fans were shut out and grassroots fixtures cancelled.
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Spurred on by the financial stresses facing his beloved local team Rogerstone AFC Will racked his brains for something which could keep him busy and benefit the club.
In April 2020 he consulted designers and manufacturers to work with him to put together his own image for a home kit for the team in the hope he could sell a few shirts to fans to bring in revenue.
“I was looking at ways for us to get kit cheaper than what we were already paying for it so I got in touch with a few factories and put some ideas together,” he told WalesOnline.
“I paid five quid to get a badge sewn on and initially all it was was a vehicle for Rogerstone to have a cheaper kit.
“We have lots of players and decided we wanted to give each player their own squad number. I made more than 100 kits and handed them out to everyone at the club.
“I set up a website and put the shirt on there and thought i’d sell maybe 20 or 30 and give all the profits to the club as a way of getting by.” Will Morgan with all of his shirts for the clubs he currently works with (Image: Mark Lewis) Will’s favourite shirt, which is the first he created and the one which shocked the whole club when it went viral (Image: Mark Lewis) Within days the dark green kits which don the recognisable logo of Rogerstone’s local brewery, Tiny Rebel, were attracting the attention of fans and selling like hot cakes. While Will, who is now well into a new job in engineering, was pleasantly surprised with the response he had no idea what was to come.
After Tiny Rebel shared the design on its social media pages thousands of orders came flooding in as far as South America and Australia.
“It just went absolutely mental,” Will explained. “I was selling 15 or so an hour for the first week. We sold 2,000 kits really quickly. I couldn’t get my head around why. I think we sold a lot because people like the design but the Tiny Rebel affiliation I’m sure helped.
“Barely a fraction of the people who bought the kits were Rogerstone fans. You’re looking at 80 or 85% who’d not been to a Rogerstone game. We were getting orders from the US, Europe, South America, Australia – everywhere.
“I never realised there was this huge community of football shirt collectors. People all around the world are connected through this football kit community online. It just spread through that so quickly. It was mad.
“I hadn’t even got a Facebook or Twitter page for the shirts at the time so that was the priority then.” Will made a shirt for his local club while furloughed in 2020 – but then he had huge demand across Wales’ grassroots scene (Image: Mark Lewis) While the majority of the revenue might have come through unexpected online sales what gives him most pride is seeing the shirts worn across the Welsh grassroots football circuit.
By the time players were allowed to return to the field teams who travelled to Rogerstone asked if Will could make their kits too and now 20 clubs including semi-professional sides are sporting Will’s kits with the latest being Llantwit Major FC and there is booming business.
“Word of mouth and away teams coming and seeing the kit and wanting their own was a big part of it,” he said. “We had a few pictures of players wearing the kit […]
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