This article was first published today in our bespoke Sports newsletter The Fixture. You can sign up in seconds to receive it straight to your inbox every weekday here.

The Fixture loves nothing better than browsing through niche football shirt websites offering rare items such as the Corinthians away kit from a few seasons ago – you know the one with half an atlas imprinted on the front? Done tastefully, kit manufacturers can get away with any number of designs that have aficionados rolling out the plaudits and exalting someone to “take my money”. What primal urge is being satisfied here? Does buying a shirt give us nerds that opportunity to retreat into childhood – however briefly – and relive that delicious moment when you spied a new kit lying underneath the Christmas tree?

There are mixed feelings attached to this preoccupation, though. Because the popularity of kits has fed a whole side industry in football whereby clubs use the emotive experience to further exploit its supporters. When the novelty wears off buying shirts for oneself, the next logical step is to buy one for your kids.

Of course, there is also a degree of self-blame attached here. If you hadn't been so desperate to plonk junior into your club's colours in the first football kit that would fit them, then they wouldn't necessarily have had the expectation that they were getting the next one. Back when The Fixture was a nipper this was a three- or sometimes four-year occurrence, then it became every second season, now some clubs have up to four kits dropping throughout the course of the summer meaning that the time that elapses between the change strips being this season's kit and next season's is ever shrinking. At present, the new Rangers home shirt – for example – costs £70 for an adult. Speaking to a kit salesman recently, he pointed out that the club is not actually making very much at all from the retail price.

“The cost price is £17.50, the trade price is usually around double that at £35, although there might be a discount attached to that and then the club is liable for VAT at £12,” said this particular retailer. “So, often, they are making approximately £23 a jersey. The real money is in the other merchandise. For example, look at the three-quarter length training jerseys that clubs sell. Often they are going for £110 or so. There is clearly a much bigger margin in those.”

£23 profit at the minimum on a shirt alone, still represents a sound profit, though. The average Premier League club in England can expect to sell 100,000 jerseys in the domestic market, the figure is closer to half a million in global sales.

The Herald:

There is a further bugbear which irks The Fixture and it pertains to the way in which tradition has become an inevitable casualty as more and more kits – limited as they are in the composition of what they can look like – are produced season after season.

It is why the new Juventus kit bears an uncanny resemblance to a Zebra trapped in some safety tape. It is a well documented part of football heritage that Juve took their lead from Notts County after the English club donated black-and-white jerseys to the Italian club 120 years ago. Now it seems they have returned the favour by aping County's kit from their most recent season in England's top flight – 1991-92 when Neil Warnock was in charge. It is a truly horrendous offering and an indication of how maverick adidas have been with Juve's once-sacrosanct vertical stripes.

Ultimately, it's the clubs who need to do more, though. They sign off on the designs and seem deaf to any objections from supporters. Furthermore they do not just make money on shirt sales. A full kit these days – including socks and shorts – can cost in the region of £120 quid. Times that by three or four and you are talking about the price of a season ticket at some grounds.

While some of this could sound like moaning for the sake of it since there is clearly no compulsion to buy a football kit, it is yet another example of the way in which clubs take advantage of their supporters and, in particular, those with young kids, at a time when they can least afford it. Is it any wonder more people turn towards websites where almost identical fakes are readily available for a fraction of the price?