Here’s What Happens To The Losing Team’s Pre-Made Super Bowl Merch

As the confetti settles following Super Bowl LIX, in which the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 40 – 22, dashing their hopes for a historic three-peat, football fans are left wondering: What happens to all the pre-made apparel for the losing team?

Players don championship gear immediately after the Super Bowl and the NFC and AFC Championship games, and fans can immediately purchase pre-made merchandise. This means manufacturers must produce the items promoting both teams as the victors in advance. Prior to 1997, the losing teams’ stuff was trashed, but these days, the items are donated instead.

According to Fast Company, the nonprofit World Vision approached the NFL in 1997 and proposed collaborating to donate the losing team’s merchandise to people in need.

Those efforts were taken over by the Virginia-based nonprofit Good360 in 2015. They also teamed up with the MLB to take the losing team’s apparel and accessories following the World Series.   

“Sunday evening when the whistle blows, the NFL wants to make sure whoever wins has at their fingertips a hat or a T-shirt,” then-Good360 CEO Romaine Seguin told the outlet in 2024. “So we aggregate the non-winner merchandise and get it into the hands of a child who can use the hat to keep the sun out of their eyes, or a shirt to keep them warm at night.”

Shari Rudolph, who was Good360’s Chief Marketing Officer, told the Los Angeles Times in 2022 that “only a few thousand items” are donated from each championship event. The outlet noted that there are strict parameters for the donations so that would-be collectors can’t get their hands on the merch and resell it online.

Rudolph was vague about where the donations ended up. “With this donation it’s a bit sensitive, so we don’t disclose the exact locations they go,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “What I can say is they end up in countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America.”

Despite these efforts, some of the items do find their way into the hands of collectors. For example, a T-shirt saying the Bengals were champions of 1989’s Super Bowl XXIII, which they lost to the San Francisco 49ers, was listed on eBay for $10,000.