As the England players trudge wearily down the Wembley tunnel, some of their opponents, whom they have just vanquished on the pitch, wait patiently in the tunnel holding their shirts.

One Andorran player steps forward as Kieran Trippier comes into range and whispers into his ear, but it isn’t his shirt he wants to trade — it’s his shorts.

Barely has Trippier gotten over the shock of the request as the next Andorra player steps forward but the England full-back knows what is coming, and starts to remove his shirt, too.

This impromptu striptease, captured by tunnel cameras, reveals the modern culture of football shirt swapping — and as Trippier discovered, the custom is no longer restricted to shirts and it isn’t just the players who are making the trades.

Shirt swapping and memento collecting are not new phenomena. The first recorded shirt-swapping ceremony came after a game between France and England in 1931, when the French requested a shirt exchange to mark their first-ever win over the English.

But for decades, it was reserved for special occasions and mainly international fixtures, with the image of Pele and Bobby Moore’s exchange after their World Cup group game in Mexico in 1970 held up as the zenith of shirt swapping — a symbol of solidarity, brotherhood and mutual respect between two icons of the game.

In that brief moment, the tribalism of football, in which the club colours are sacred and the shirt used captured the blood and sweat of players in their defence, was suspended. Yet not all managers have allowed bought into this ritual, most notably Sir Alf Ramsay in the 1966 World Cup when he forcibly stopped George Cohen from swapping his shirt with Alberto G onzalez after a particularly fractious quarter-final against Argentina at Wembley. Sir Alex Ferguson also famously warned his players against the practice because of the, in his eyes, sacred nature of the Manchester United shirt.

Leicester City kit manager Paul McAndrew, who was appointed to the role by Martin O’Neill in 1996 after two years of being the club’s coach driver, also experienced another time when a manager was less than impressed by one of his players swapping their shirt.

“The first example of shirt swapping I can remember was in Martin’s days, around ’97 or ’98,” he says. “It was Steve Walsh at Arsenal. He got Dennis Bergkamp’s shirt. We had just been beaten and Walshy walks up the tunnel and throws the shirt at me, and says ‘Don’t let the gaffer see that’ — but he saw him throw the shirt to me.

“Martin has come to speak to me before speaking to the players and asked whose shirt it was. I said it was Bergkamp’s. He has gone back in and tore Walshy to shreds, saying it was the closest he had got to Bergkamp’s shirt all game.”

On this day at World Cup 1970 Pele and Bobby Moore swapped shirts after Brazil vs England pic.twitter.com/VtVvFjZUb8

— Old Days Football (@OldDaysFootball) June 7, 2021

However, over the past few decades, the culture of shirt swapping has grown enormously: to the extent that after every game, club employees can be seen running between the home and away dressing rooms with armfuls of shirts to swap, and some teams even submit requests for certain shirts in advance.

Kit managers at the Premier League clubs even have their own WhatsApp group and communicate before games about their shirt-swapping requests.

At each club, players are usually given two shirts per game so that they can change at half-time into a fresh one but also so they can have a replacement in case of a damaged or tarnished jersey. If they choose to, they can then keep both shirts after the game to trade, pass on to friends and family, or give to charities, but must pay the cost of each shirt that requires replacing.

Most players do take their shirts but not all. Some players are reluctant swappers — most notably, Lionel Messi, who says the only player in his career he requested a shirt from was Zinedine Zidane. He said he has never been bothered about swapping, although he doesn’t turn down jerseys offered to him by opposition players and has a huge collection as a result. Perhaps the Marc Albrighton shirt he received after the International Champions Cup game between Barcelona and Leicester City in Stockholm in 2016 is hanging alongside Zidane’s.

On that occasion, Albrighton wasn’t the only one to get a Messi shirt as arrangements had been made before the game to satisfy other requests, with Jamie Vardy and a couple of others also getting a shirt.

Yet legends like Messi aren’t always so generous. Usually, it is the poor old kit assistants who get sent to request the shirts but once, after Atalanta had played Juventus, German defender Robin Gosens approached Cristiano Ronaldo himself, hoping to get in first and ask for his shirt before anyone else.

“After the final whistle I went to him… but Ronaldo did not accept,” he wrote in his autobiography Dreams Are Worthwhile. “I asked: ‘Cristiano, can I have your shirt?’. He didn’t even look at me, he just said: ‘No!’.

“I was completely ashamed. I went away and felt small. You know that moment when something embarrassing happens and you look around to see if anyone noticed it? That’s what I felt and tried to hide it.”

But Gosens did get his hands on a Ronaldo shirt in the end as his team-mate Hans Hateboer went and bought one, and surprised Gosens with it in the Atalanta dressing room.

Hans Hateboer bought Robin Gosens a Cristiano Ronaldo shirt to make up for him being rejected after a game  pic.twitter.com/eCBp8NSumN

It isn’t just the players’ kit that is of interest. Sammy Lee, when he was West Bromwich Albion’s assistant manager, was successful when he approached Marcelo Bielsa at the end of the final game of the 2020-21 season to request his jacket.

West Brom had already been relegated when he made his request after a 3-1 loss to Leeds. Bielsa looked confused at first but then began to smile and started checking his pockets, indicating the trade would take place down the tunnel.

Sometimes, a swap is one-way, with the target possessing little interest in the shirt of the requester but out of respect, some of the game’s greats always insist on a full trade.

“We played Manchester United when Micky Adams was manager and it was the day we got relegated from the Premier League,” recalls McAndrew. “France captain Laurent Blanc played for them and we had John Ashton, a young kid, playing for us.

“After the game, John asked Laurent for his shirt. Blanc is a nice fella and took it off. John said thanks and kept his shirt on. Laurent looked at him as if to say, ‘OK, now you’. John looked all embarrassed and said: ‘What, you want my shirt?’. Blanc replied: ‘Of course!’.

“I like to think that somewhere, Laurent Blanc has a John Ashton shirt hanging in his house.”

Dundalk’s Michael Duffy was equally star-struck when he came up against Arsenal, the club he grew up supporting, in the Europa League in October 2020. Straight after the final whistle of a 3-0 defeat, Duffy was a man on a mission.

“Straight after the match, I ran for (Pierre-Emerick) Aubameyang’s jersey,” he tells The Athletic. “He wasn’t playing but I saw him walking up the tunnel, went straight up to him and asked.

“I said I’m a big fan and asked for his jersey. He said, ‘That’s brilliant’, gave me his jersey, and he took mine as well. Hopefully, he turns up on his Instagram story in a Dundalk kit one day. That’d be great.

“I got Kieran Tierney’s as well because I knew him from Celtic, so he gave me one of his jerseys, too. It’s great. I’ll get them framed and have them for the memories.”

Some players can keep the same two shirts all season. At Leicester, Youri Tielemans is known to return his shirts after games and rarely exchanges with other players, while one young professional on loan at Leicester took his shirts until he was informed of the cost per game. Then he returned the lot.

Some Premier League players may not be too bothered about swapping but when top clubs play lower-league opposition in cup competitions, or in Europe, the requests can be all-encompassing. It isn’t uncommon for the bigger clubs to leave their lower-league hosts without any of the kit they arrived with.

When Leicester went to one lower-league team in the FA Cup, the requests for shirts were so prolific that the manager of the opposition asked for them to be given to him so he could hand them out based on his rating of individual performances, and avoid any squabbles. The man of the match could get his pick of whichever shirt he wanted.

The manager did this to stop the substitutes from running onto the pitch to grab the most popular shirts as the players walked off, as had happened following their previous games against high-profile opposition. Leicester returned with hardly anything left but then sent out an additional Vardy shirt, even though he hadn’t featured in the squad, at the manager’s request.

“I remember one in the FA Cup under Martin O’Neill away at Hereford United,” recalls McAndrew. “It was 0-0 and so it went to a replay. At full-time, all the kit was gone — but there was a replay.

“We beat them in the replay and they knocked on the door wanting more kit! It was when it was a problem to get shirts in those days. We had our own manufacturer, Fox Leisure, but it wasn’t always easy to get new kit.

“The manufacturers used to say they would be bringing down replacement kit to the stadium on the day of the game, so it would be 12pm at Filbert Street and I had no kit! The relief when he turned up was incredible.”

The demand for shirts from lower-division players has become so great that Premier League clubs don’t put names on the back of shirts for pre-season games.

The trading is usually done by the kit management staff but in the modern game, where players invariably know someone in the opposition camp — whether they are former team-mates or international colleagues — swaps are done individually between players but usually only in the tunnel or dressing rooms, and only at full time.

Brendan Rodgers was Liverpool boss when Mario Balotelli was seen swapping shirts with the Real Madrid defender Pepe as they both left the pitch at half-time, with Liverpool 3-0 down in their Champions League Group B game at Anfield in 2014.

The Italian striker was replaced by Adam Lallana at the interval but Rodgers said after the game it was a tactical decision and not a reaction to the exchange.

“That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Rodgers told Sky Sports when informed of the shirt swap. “But if that’s the case, then I wouldn’t like it. It’s something that I don’t like to see. I’ve seen it happen in other leagues and other countries, but it’s certainly something that doesn’t happen here and shouldn’t happen.

“We had an incident last year here with a player, which I dealt with, and if that’s the case, then I’ll deal with this as well.”

Former Arsenal defender Andre Santos also fell foul of a half-time swap, receiving criticism for being spotted trading his jersey with former team-mate Robin van Persie as players walked towards the tunnel during his team’s 2-1 loss to Manchester United in November 2012 — just a few months after the Dutch striker had swapped north London for the north west.

Swapping shirts can also be unpopular with some team-mates, as Steve Hodge found when he traded his England shirt for Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” shirt after the controversial World Cup quarter-final clash in Mexico in 1986. However, Hodge recently auctioned it off for over £7 million.

Just like that individual trade, shirts can be sought after — and potentially lucrative — long after they are swapped. Eddie Gray, the legendary Leeds United winger, took David Webb’s shirt in the aftermath of the 1970 FA Cup final replay, a game Leeds lost 2-1. The result earned Chelsea their first ever FA Cup and a few years back, the London club approached Gray to buy Webb’s shirt after discovering the former Scotland international had it in his possession. It was purchased for their museum at Stamford Bridge.

“I was never that sentimental about shirts,” Gray says, “but if we’d known how things would turn out, we’d probably all have been swapping them all the time.

“Back then, you didn’t that they’d be worth anything to anyone else but Chelsea wanted David’s for their museum, and that was fine. I never made anything like Steve (Hodge) did — I should say that! But I’m delighted for him. He got that Maradona top and good luck to him.”

Michael Owen revealed on Channel 4 before England’s draw with Germany earlier this month how, in 2001, he inadvertently swapped his shirt with defender Jorge Bohme only to realise the magnitude of his hat-trick and England’s famous 5-1 win in Munich, so he entered a deflated German dressing room and traded his shirt back for an unworn one.

Owen was a pundit for the game and after the 1-1 Nations League draw, footage from the players’ tunnel captured another trade, 21 years after Owen’s shirt-swap mistake. Antonio Rudiger is seen waiting patiently for Harry Kane and asking politely for a swap, with Kane looking not entirely ecstatic about the transaction.

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At Euro ’96, amid a heated Battle of Britain between England and Scotland at Wembley Stadium, another notable swap took place.

In the build-up to the game, Scotland’s Stuart McCall revealed his nine-year-old daughter Carly was a huge fan of his Rangers colleague — and England’s best player — Paul Gascoigne. McCall never asked Gascoigne but as the pair walked down the tunnel at half-time, with the game hanging in the balance, Gascoigne handed him his shirt.

“He just gave it me and said, ‘This is for your daughter’,” McCall told the Daily Record. “Bearing in mind he’d had a quiet game up to then, that just showed the type of person he was: so generous and thoughtful.”

To many who collect other players’ shirts, they are special, cherished memories of their careers. Former Leicester defender Christian Fuchs has more than 200 in his collection at his New York home, collected during a lengthy career with Austria, Schalke and Leicester. Among them are shirts from Raul, Wayne Rooney and his old Leicester team-mates.

Yet the ones that mean the most to him are his own shirts from key moments in his career, such as the 2016 Premier League title success.

He told Axios Charlotte before his MLS debut for Charlotte FC last month that he intended to keep those shirts for his collection.

“There are a couple of them in that are very special,” he said. “I mean, they’re all nice, don’t get me wrong. For me, it’s just memories and letting those memories live in my man cave.

“The first jersey I wear for the first game for Charlotte FC is simply something I want. I’m not returning those jerseys. It’s a special moment for everybody. I think everybody will understand. As well as the first home game, which is equally important, equally precious is the first away game.”

Shirt swapping has become such an accepted part of the game today that clubs such as Leicester have moved on from having just 100 shirts for the first team and reserves for the entire season, as they did in the 1990s. Leicester can get through nearly 1,200 shirts across the season.

McAndrew says that, thankfully, he has never run out of kit, but he did come close during the 2015-16 campaign, when Leicester created footballing history.

“I was sweating,” he says. “There were games we wore the away kit when we didn’t have to, just to protect the blue kit.

“Sometimes you can fall back on the stock in the club shop if you run out, although I have never had to do that. That year, they had sold everything out by Christmas!

“The lads were good and helped me. However, for the Everton game (the final home game of the season when Leicester lifted the Premier League trophy, in which Leicester wore their new kit for 2016-17), if we needed a full set for that game instead of wearing the new strip, I don’t think I could have done it. It would have been a problem if someone ripped or bloodied their shirt.

“They had just one of the original shirts left each and wore them for the ceremony. The new kit was a saviour. It got me right out of jail.”

For a while, COVID-19 protocols put a pause on the culture of shirt swapping, preventing the exchanges within the red zones of stadiums, but it is now back with a vengeance.

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)