Shorts of professional football players sold for auction sparking outrage

Surely AS Roma had not anticipated such a heartbreaking reaction? At the beginning of February, the Roman club auctioned off its players’ outfits on the Match Worn Shirts platform for charity. The club had previously used the platform extensively to sell jerseys for its men’s team, but strangely it also offered shorts worn by its female footballers.

The result of the auction is quite disturbing. While the players’ jerseys or tracksuits never fetched more than 124 euros on the site – and generally went for much lower prices – the shorts presented reached more than 300 euros for some, going up to 565 euros.

The shorts of Giulia Galli, aged only 17, were also among the pieces to be sold. While some of the men’s team jerseys cost more than 1,000 euros, most do not cost 500 euros, unlike the shorts of Alayah Pilgrim and Giada Greggi. A clear inconsistency for clothing often sought after by collectors: usually, jerseys are much more successful.

“Hypersexualization of the female body”

“We can wonder about the motivations of people to buy clothing that is closest to the player’s body and which is not linked, in everyone’s mind, to the sporting performance, but rather in an approach that is more fetishistic than promoting the athlete,” commented Charlotte Roisin-Deltombe to the Dégaine media.

The co-president of the “Her Game Too France” association identifies the “problem of hypersexualization of the female body in sport”. “Women’s bodies are far too often commented on and analyzed and the object of attention that has no reason to be,” observes the leader of the organization, whose objective is to fight against sexism in stadiums.

For Charlotte Roisin-Deltombe, the psychological consequences are numerous for a player, “reduced to her body and an object of fantasy” and whose sporting performance finds itself discredited.