The slowest part of making a football kit isn't manufacturing

Every summer the same story plays out in thousands of team group chats. Someone says “we should do a new kit this season.” Everyone agrees. Everyone has opinions. Weeks pass. The first fixture gets close, then very close, and suddenly the relaxed project is an emergency.

The instinct is to blame the factory — production must be the slow part, all that printing and sewing and shipping. It isn’t. We make custom kits for a living, and we can put numbers on both halves of the timeline: production takes 7–12 days and rarely surprises anyone — more than 95% of our orders arrive inside the promised 25–30-day window. The average team, meanwhile, takes 2–3 weeks to get from “this is our design” to a confirmed order. The deciding takes longer than the making.

“Production is the part people worry about, and the part that never surprises us. The weeks before the order are where the time goes: the vote among teammates, the sponsor who wants the logo shown differently, the payments trickling in to the captain. Each one adds a delay nobody planned for.”
— Alberto, founder, MOMUTO

This is an old story, at every scale

In the mid-1980s, consultants at Kurt Salmon Associates timed the entire US apparel supply chain, fibre to checkout. The average pipeline ran 66 weeks — and actual manufacturing accounted for 6–17% of it. The rest was waiting: goods and decisions sitting between approvals and handoffs. Our version is gentler, but forty years later it is the same shape: the making is the minority of the elapsed time, and the deciding is the rest.

The anatomy of the 2–3 weeks

The vote. Show a group several options and a back-and-forth is natural. Psychology says it is also predictable: group decisions carry coordination costs that grow with every voice, and Parkinson’s law of triviality — the bike-shed effect — guarantees the most discussable topic absorbs the most discussion. A football shirt is the perfect bike shed: everyone can picture it, everyone has taste, everyone will wear the outcome.

The sponsor. The single biggest drag we see. Sponsors want to see the mockup before they bless it, and often ask for changes to their logo’s visibility or position. Reasonable — and slow, because it adds an external approval loop to an internal one. Construction firms know the pattern at industrial scale: across a million-plus formal decision requests, the median one waited about ten days for an answer. Your sponsor is an RFI with a logo.

The money. Someone is always late paying the captain. The order cannot be confirmed until the pot is full — so the last €20 holds the whole squad’s kit.

The sizes — the innocent villain. Everyone assumes collecting sizes is the nightmare. Our orders say the opposite: size lists usually arrive in under 24 hours. By that stage the squad is excited; things are finally happening. The stage teams fear most is the fastest one in the process.

And the planning fallacy explains why every club believes this year will be different: in the classic study, students estimated 33.9 days for their thesis and took 55.5 — even at “99% certain,” barely half hit their date. Lateness isn’t a character flaw. It’s a forecast.

What actually works

1. Give the decision a date, not a vibe. Externally imposed deadlines beat self-set ones. “We vote Thursday, majority wins” outperforms “let’s see what everyone thinks.”

2. Send the sponsor the mockup early, not last. Their approval loop is the longest one you don’t control. Start it first.

3. Start from finished, not from blank. Defaults are the strongest force in decision science — organ-donor consent is 12% in Germany and 99.98% in Austria, nearly identical countries, and the difference is which box is pre-ticked. A finished design you adjust is a default. A blank canvas is a committee meeting.

Where Ready to Play came from

That third finding is, honestly, the origin story of our Ready to Play wall. Configurators that start from blank templates give total freedom — and ask for the customer’s time, which players don’t always want to give. Watching the briefs teams send us taught us something else too: when Barcelona, Juventus or AC Milan release a new kit, the references we receive shift within weeks. So our studio started building finished, trend-aware designs of its own — open one in 3D and change everything, or just drop in your colours and crest and have something that looks pro in minutes. The most-chosen design on the wall so far is THE FRACTURE; Brazil’s abstract away-kit camouflage is why THE PHANTOM exists.

“When a big club drops a new kit, we usually see it referenced in the briefs a couple of weeks later. Ready to Play is us getting there before the group chat does — and making it available to every team.”
— Dmitry, designer, MOMUTO

Do the arithmetic before the season does it for you

The practical version of this article is one page: When should a team order its jerseys? — the backwards count from your first fixture, mapped onto the real league calendar. The short version: start 7–9 weeks out, confirm the order 4–5 weeks out — and if you’re later than that, there’s a fast lane (+€59, saves roughly 7 days) and a wall of finished designs for exactly that reason.

Sources

Kurt Salmon Associates apparel-pipeline study, via “The Evolution of Quick Response Programs” (Springer): link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-04313-0_1 · Buehler, Griffin & Ross, “Exploring the planning fallacy” (JPSP, 1994) · Navigant Construction Forum RFI study · Ariely & Wertenbroch, “Procrastination, deadlines, and performance” (Psychological Science, 2002) · Johnson & Goldstein, “Do defaults save lives?” (Science, 2003) · C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law (1957). MOMUTO figures: orders observed through August 2026; stated as averages.