Collectors Club

“Whenever I think of Yeovil Town, I think of Phil Jevons!” says Tom Williams in our first DM back and forth. Mentioning the best goalscorer to ever play for my boyhood club is a great way to start proceedings. If niche - okay very niche - references to English lower-league footballers and clubs are your thing, then you’re in the right place. If not, stick with us because Tom and his exhaustive and definitive collection of Lincoln City football shirts are a textbook example of niche collecting. It’s a tale of passion, dedication, and hope that can be replicated for whatever your interest is.

Cards on the table, Tom is Product Operations Manager at Classic Football Shirts. Post-university, he was stacking shelves in Lincolnshire, pondering what ‌on earth could be next. He’d initially applied for a job as Product Administrator but was told he was unsuccessful, but “his details would be kept on file”. We’ve all had our own experiences like that: the crush of rejection and onto the next application form, motivation dwindling with every submission.

Six months after his first interview, after yet another shift at the supermarket, his phone rang. His details had actually been kept on file, and he was asked to come back for another interview. This time he was successful. “I had to hold back the tears when I found out. It’s really difficult after university; you desperately search for direction and a little luck. That was eight years ago, and my life since has been all about football shirts. I’ve seen hundreds of thousands, each one with a story, and my 150 Lincoln shirts tell so many stories.”

In another world, Tom might have been the leading collector of Grimsby Town or Scunthorpe United shirts. Living in Market Rasen, he had three lower-league football clubs nearby to choose from. Growing up like many watching Match of the Day, Tom asked his Dad one day to take him to a match and it was Lincoln City v Kidderminster Harriers. The rest is history; the decision was made and Tom’s future would soon become dominated by the Imps and trips with his mate to Sincil Bank and an appreciation of the attacking talents of Gary Taylor-Fletcher.

As youngsters we just wanted the latest shirt and Tom was no different; the Lincoln City home shirt from the 2004/05 season was the first of very many. What started as an annual refresh of the latest shirt to wear to matches turned into something more serious once he started working at the CFS warehouse in East Manchester, a big Joe Hart goal kick away from the Etihad Stadium.

Tom recalls: “Among all the incredible shirts, there was usually a Lincoln City one now and then, and it snowballed from there. I’ve always been pretty good at spreadsheets, which is handy because my job depends on it! I started one with all the Lincoln home and away shirts since 1990. eBay was still really useful, and I had all the notifications set up and luckily for me there wasn’t huge competition for Lincoln City shirts, so I could really grow my collection. Like everyone else during COVID, I had a bit more disposable income and more time; that’s when it really got out of hand!”

Football shirts are a significant entry point to finding out more about the history of the game, a player, or even a lower-league football club. Tom regularly mentions the research he puts in. He buys many programmes, not because he’s collecting them as well, but for research. If you’re collecting Real Madrid, Inter Milan or Arsenal shirts, everything is out there on the internet. If your passions are a little more niche, you need to dig even deeper, and faded black and white pictures from a random away game in a tattered programme can provide confirmation and sometimes inspiration. Tom’s attention to detail is such that he has spent many hours on a site that has all the Exeter City programmes scanned, with any Lincoln references helping to further his knowledge of his own football club hundreds of miles further up the country.

And whilst shirts are always his priority, being the expert of all things, Lincoln City means he’s picked up some really significant pieces of ephemera. The oldest item in his collection is a 1972 club blazer with the Lincoln crest with wiry embroidery, which he picked up from a bookseller in Northampton on eBay. Those random purchases are a product of the many hours spent scouring online, and one such interaction on Facebook led Tom to get his Dad to pick up a 1990 away shirt to leave just one shirt remaining in his initial quest to get every shirt post 1990.

Each shirt has a story, each one is a journey, and when I ask Tom to describe his favourite shirt - always a question that elicits long pauses when I ask collectors - he picks the 1979-1983 match-worn Imps home shirt. In his day job, Tom had seen it come through the CFS system, and he kept asking the powers that be how much they wanted for it. Being exclusive and match-worn he was told it was being put in the CFS Vault.

Tom picks up the story: “It kept bothering me; once I knew it was there, I really wanted it, but I understood why they wanted to keep it. It didn’t stop me asking now and then. On my fifth anniversary of working at CFS, one of the founders, Doug and my manager, Jon, presented me with the actual shirt to reward me for my service. I couldn’t believe it! Like any important football shirt, the memories attached to it are what matter, and outside of it being a very rare piece, it means so much to me because of how and why I got hold of it. That’s the one I’d grab first if I had to leave the building very quickly!”

As with any collector, there is always a holy grail in mind: the one piece that is still left blank on the spreadsheet, the one itch that you hope to scratch at some point. For Tom, that is the away shirt that the club wore between 1979 and 1982. “We wore it for three seasons, which is hard to imagine these days. It’s a forest green colour, with a big red Lincoln badge. I’ve got a picture of Phil Neale wearing it in a game against Watford in the snow. It’s an iconic image and makes me want to get my hands on it even more. So if anyone has one of those, please let me know!”

There is no one way for collectors to approach their art, though Tom’s affinity for spreadsheets has certainly helped him keep track of his collection, which now extends to over 160 shirts. They are all housed in his spare room on a sturdy metal rail - after the previous plastic iteration buckled under the weight of so much history.

“I had a cheap little rubbish plastic one, and it snapped, and it caused a very stressful day. It collapsed into the room, and there was stuff everywhere. I was very on edge that day; my missus was creeping around the house. It’s times like that, that I wish had more space. I’m currently in an apartment. It's a decently sized apartment, but it's not a house. My plan is to have a room big enough that I can spread them all out because I’m basically cramming them in now. It's pretty tightly packed in.”

Tom’s own personal collection is kept very separate from his day job at Classic Football Shirts, though there is plenty of room for crossover. As well as seeing any gems that passed through the warehouse, his own organisational skills were key to changing how the business operated behind the scenes.

“I remember how we used to organize the shirts by country or club. If you'd listed a Slovan Bratislava shirt, you'd need to know what country that was because they were the Slovak shirts together, the Slovenian shirts together, the Czech shirts were together, the Bulgarian shirts were together. We alphabetised within that chronologically, then by the home and the away. I remember my first responsibility that I got that wasn't listing was trying to sort out the amount of missing we were having. Every day we'd be sent a list of the shirts that had been ordered that the dispatch team couldn't find. The shirts that we were selling, we were struggling to find where we had put them. When we moved to Hyde, one of the first big operational changes was that we had to abandon ‌the alphabet system. Now if you go, you can still see all the shirts, but upstairs it's pretty operational. They're all pigeonholes wrapped up, ready for easy dispatch. It is sad but obviously understandable that it’s more organised; it used to be so much fun just flicking through all the shirts trying to find something!"

That sentimental lilt for the tangibility of football shirts is key to Tom’s own collection, like many others around the world. While some opt to frame or stash their shirts away in mint condition; for Tom they are made to be shown and - for the small percentage that fit him - worn. It is what brings his collection to life, far beyond pieces of nylon and polyester with a particular badge on them. The hope is that his Lincoln City collection will one day be shown off to those looking for a slice of impish history and nostalgia.

“My dream is to do an exhibition. There are a few things that I would love to do, and one of 'em is to do some sort of exhibition with the club. It is the niche history of it. I'm collecting stuff often that I don't remember, obviously before my time. I was going in 2004, but I've got all that stuff."

“When I show a shirt to someone who's a Lincoln fan who's older than me, they're like, ‘Oh, that reminds me of this player. I might not have heard of them; they're just niche nineties League Two players. I love the tactile nature of the history of a football shirt. I find that super special. The fact that this was something that's old, like a lot of 'em are old now. A shirt from the 1980s and it’s 50 years old, and that's genuine history that you can sort of see and feel.”