Monday, February 5- Local/State/National Affairs

Monday, February 5

Beyond the fight between cable channels to televise the Super Bowl lies another market involving this annual football event. Sales of t-shirts and caps displaying the name of the team that wins the Super Bowl is huge for the t-shirt market. At the approach of 00:00 on the clock, manufacturers get ready to start their machines producing shirts and caps to be on the shelves the next morning in stores.
This all begins with the production of tshirts and hats for the players of the team that actually wins. A large sum of 288 tshirts and hats are produced for each team in advance of the Super Bowl, to give out to the players, coaches, staff, and families of the winning teams. The NFL has strict rules of where those products of the losers go, for "those items are never to appear on television of on eBay. They are never even to be seen on American soil."
The Monday morning after the football game ends, the tshirts and caps are sent to a warehouse near Pittsburgh, PA, where they fall into the hands of World Vision, "a relief organization that will package the clothing in wooden boxes and send it to a developing nation, usually in Africa."
The director of community ventures of the NFL worked in Ethiopia for a while in 1998, and spotted a village boy wearing a Super Bowl Champions t-shirt of 1998 starring the Green Bay Packers. She was the only person in the village to spot this as odd, as the Denver Broncos were the Champions of this Super Bowl.
The tshirts of the losers of the Super Bowl could sell for some money as they are rare on eBay, but the NFL chooses to give them away. This may be because they do not want them on American soil for their own reasoning, but it is nice that they donate so much to people that have no electricity or running water.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/sports/football/04gear.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin