“I just wanted to root for the Cubs, why do we have to bring death into this?”

~Normal Baseball Fans

Look at that right there. That, friends, is a bad idea for a sports shirt. It’s not for sale anymore since, you know, the Cubs won one before many (not all ☹) people died. But as sports apparel, it’s shockingly bad. It’s awkward, it’s weird, and it makes everyone involved uncomfortable. And it’s hardly unique among athletic paraphernalia. There are a shocking amount of shirts, jerseys, and, well, miscellaneous items out there for sale that are intended to show your mettle as a true “super fan” that back fire in truly spectacular ways. Here are some of those items.

The Worst Sports Fan Apparel Ever Made

Yes, that is a high-heel shoe wine bottle holder.

Despite the fact that pretty much every writer on our staff dresses themselves like a sleepy teenage boy, grabbing the first pair of clean(ish) shirt and pants in their dresser, what you wear does say a lot about you as an individual.

When you buy a nice button down shirt or blazer, you’re telling the world you’re looking to be taken seriously. When you buy a shirt of your favorite sports team, you’re telling the world you’re a true fan, not some bandwagon jumper (though you probably are still a bandwagon jumper). And when you buy an Ed Hardy shirt you’re telling the world that you were a douchebag in 2007 who just woke up from an eleven year coma.

The point being, when it comes to buying apparel for your favorite team, you’re probably going to be putting a lot of thought into the purchase. Do you get a shirt, or a jersey? If you go with a jersey, what player’s jersey should you get? There are a lot of acceptable choices out there, but it’s up to you to determine which outfit is the best for you.

The answer to any of those questions, by the way, will not include any of these following clothing items, because yeesh.

Back in 2011, Victoria’s Secret decided that female Michigan State fans should be able to buy overpriced shirts through their Pink line that properly show their fandom for Michigan State athletics. And what better way to avoid propagating that tired, blatantly bullshit stereotype that women don’t know as much about sports as their male counterparts than by making a Spartans shirt with “Hail to Victors,” or the lyrics to rival Michigan’s fight song, on it. The item was soon pulled, but the law of averages tell us that there is at least one woman out there who actually purchased the shirt. She’s still out there, responding to the waitress at Buffalo Wild Wings with, “No, Michigan State. You meant to tell me, ‘Hey, you know that’s the fight song for Michigan State.’ Not just Michigan. Jeesh, learn your feetball teams, lady.”

And speaking of bad misprints…

The only existence of this we’ve found was a single tweet sent in 2012, so we’re pretty sure this was a bootlegged hoodie gone wrong, and not something that the Cincinnati Reds actually sat down to make. Unless there’s a market for people who like the Reds and the Cardinals, and want to represent both teams with a hoodie that looks like it’ll fall apart after three washes.

This is not something you’d buy on purpose, it’s just the result of sweatshop workers in Vietnam not knowing what sports logos belong to what team, which we don’t fault them for. But we do fault you if you buy this and still choose to wear it out in public.

And since we’re on the topic of misprints and typos…

So yeah, apparently when West Virginia won the NIT championship in 2007, at least one batch of championship t-shirts thought that “Virginia” was spelled “Virgina” which seems more like an Abbot and Costello bit between a printing company and a purchaser with a really strong Southern accent than an actual thing that happened in real life, but here we are. Admittedly, it’s arguably more embarrassing to proudly wear an NIT championship shirt than to wear a shirt with your team name misspelled, but that’s just our opinion.

All the above shirts are no longer available for purchase, which is at least somewhat encouraging. Much less so is the fact that, um, well, all of the following items are still for sale as of this writing. As in, yes, you can go out and buy them.

Please don’t.

Oh wow, they’re on sale! You can save $23 dollars if you buy now. And really, who doesn’t want to spend $87 dollars on a pair of shoes that say, “It’s 1998 and I’m in a club sitting with Ray Lewis’s entourage.” Like, this is…just a lot. It’s a lot you guys. The crystal accents. The fake velvet. The orange leopard print for the shoe’s lining, can we talk about that orange leopard print in the shoe’s lining?

And of course the heels that look like they can and have been used to stab a dude who tried to get too handsy in a strip club parking lot. We’re half surprised that the shoes don’t automatically come with an oversized curly wig and giant hoop earrings. It’s almost as if just about every apparel company doesn’t know how to make clothing for women who also happen to sports fans, you know?

No, like we mean it, they really don’t know how to make apparel for women sports fans. Like up there—we have some nice butt-fitting jeans that happen to have…just, a Bulls logo on the back pockets.

They look like someone took a metal decal and glued it onto some jeans, which actually might be exactly what Alyssa Milano did. Yes, Alyssa Milano designed these jeans as a way for women of all shapes and sizes (well, actually, they’re only sold for 29-inch waistlines) who want to say, “I like the Chicago Bulls, and also like the feeling of sitting on metallic discs all day. So you know, your standard  basketball fan.

The more fervent the fanbase for a team is, the more really bad t-shirt designs exist for their fans. Like this one for the Packers. Like, we get it, Wisconsin loves their cheese, and it is one of their more endearing qualities, and even the cheesehead hats are enjoyable and fun, but this is a bridge too far. Saying “I Bleed Cheese” on a shirt is bad, and dumb, and kind of gross, but saying “I Bleed Cheese” on a shirt with some weird animated cheese man with an oozing laceration slicing into his entire bicep is grounds for arrest.

This isn’t even the only bad idea Boston Celtics-branded swimwear that you can find on fanatics.com, it’s just the worst idea. Like, look at that, that looks patently absurd, doesn’t it? It’s dumber than the bikini bottoms you can get, or the leopard print bottoms you can get, or the string bikini, all of which are cringe-worth in their own rights. But yeah, no, this is bad looking. Don’t wear this at the beach, ladies. Or ever. Just don’t buy it. In fact, pretend you don’t even know it exists, you’ll be happier for that in the long run.

But you can’t have an article about bad sports apparel without some bad sexual puns based off a team’s name. Like, say, the Toronto Blue Jays. If only there was some way…to make a cringeworthy pun…about the fact that you like a team…called the B…lue…Jays…

There we fucking go.   Yeah you can buy that shit on Amazon if you want. It’s a handmade product, which means it was designed with care for the woman that wants the world to know that she loves the Blue Jays, and also is the kind of person who likes to point to their novelty shirt and say, “Heh, get it? Like, blowjobs, but also Blue Jays, they got some of the same letters dude!”

So, yeah, sigh. That’s a thing that’s out there. That people wear. And enjoy wearing. Like they wear it to games and stuff. It’s their default baseball shirt. We just got very sad all of a sudden.

Anyway. Um, here are a bunch of shirts that Patriots fans started making when they signed Tim Tebow for that one brief second. Which are truly awful, but somehow cheer us up. No seriously, look at them, they’re so bad. So bad.

We weren’t kidding.

Ah yes. That’s the stuff. You can always count on Boston fans to end things on a high note.