Think £90 for an England shirt is bad? Try 54 days’ wages
Mark Tovey is a finance journalist with bylines in The Guardian, The Motley Fool, and more. He digs into data and FOI-based investigations, and makes finance easier to understand.
Last updated 10th June 2026
3 min read
- We compared 2026 World Cup shirt prices with local minimum wages
- England’s £89.99 shirt takes around seven hours of minimum-wage work to afford, while Scotland’s £75 shirt takes around six
- The least affordable shirts were Ghana, Egypt, Senegal and the Ivory Coast, where fans would need between 151 and 432 hours of minimum-wage work
- Switzerland came out cheapest in working-time terms at around four and a half hours, followed by Norway and Australia.
A new England shirt is the sort of purchase that already feels faintly ridiculous. You hand over £89.99 for something you will treasure until the fourth barbecue of the summer, when it picks up Dorito dust, beer froth and the faint smear of a rogue Pimm’s strawberry.
Nike supplies England’s shirt. Adidas supplies Scotland’s. This matters only because Scottish fans get off slightly lighter, with their new home shirt priced at £75 on Adidas’s UK store. A rare win for north-of-the-border household budgeting.
For someone on the UK minimum wage, though, the damage is still just about manageable. An England shirt takes around seven hours of work to afford. Scotland’s takes around six.
That might make you wince, but that is the price of patriotism, right?
Well, not quite. The cost of backing your country at the World Cup, while looking pristine enough to suggest you have not yet dropped salsa on yourself, varies wildly depending on where you happen to have been born.
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How many hours’ work for a World Cup shirt?
We looked at the cost of men’s 2026 home replica shirts for countries heading to this summer’s World Cup, then compared those prices with local minimum wages. The results put British grumbling into perspective.
Most affordable shirts
A worker on the relevant Swiss wage benchmark would need around four hours to afford Switzerland’s shirt. Norway and Australia came in at around five hours, while New Zealand, Sweden and Scotland were around six.
England fans might wince at £90, but in global terms they have little to complain about. Germany, Canada and the Netherlands fans face a similarly short shift – proof that it's not the price of the shirt that matters, it's the size of your paycheque.
Least affordable shirts
At the other end of the scale, in Ghana, a worker on the national minimum wage would need to work around 432 hours, or 54 eight-hour days, to afford the country’s 2026 home shirt. The shirt is priced at $100 on Puma’s official US store, while Ghana’s daily minimum wage is GHS 21.77, equivalent to roughly 17p an hour when converted using an eight-hour working day.
Egypt's official Puma home shirt costs EGP 5,999, or around £84. Based on the private-sector minimum wage of EGP 7,000 a month, that comes to about 178 hours of work, or 22 eight-hour days.
Senegal and the Ivory Coast were close behind. Senegal’s shirt would take around 152 hours of minimum-wage work, while the Ivory Coast’s would take around 151 hours. Both shirts were priced through official Puma international stores, as no official local-currency online retailer was found.
The complete rankings are below, from most to least affordable.
Methodology
We compared the listed price of men’s 2026 home replica shirts with the hourly national minimum wage, or the nearest available minimum-wage benchmark, in each country.
Shirt prices were taken from official federation shops, official manufacturer stores or authorised retailers where available. Where no official local-currency online retailer was found, we used the official international supplier price.
Where minimum wages were published as daily rates, we converted them using an eight-hour working day. Where minimum wages were published as monthly rates, we converted them using a 40-hour working week, unless the source or labour-law framework clearly indicated a different standard working week.
Countries with no verifiable shirt price were excluded (Algeria, Iran, Iraq and Uzbekistan).
Some countries, including Austria, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, do not have a single UK-style national statutory minimum wage, so sectoral, regional or collective-agreement benchmarks were used.
