As the US women’s national soccer team heads into the World Cup finals, retailers say team merchandise is flying off shelves at record levels — with one Brooklyn soccer store struggling just to keep the letters of star Megan Rapinoe’s name in stock.
Nike recently announced that the team’s jersey is now its best-selling soccer jersey in a single season on Nike.com.
And at Upper 90 in Downtown Brooklyn, workers say kits to add Rapinoe’s name to jerseys have been running hot thanks to her star performance in the World Cup and controversial comments about visiting the White House.
“The USA stuff has been [selling out] nonstop. We had to get shipments constantly throughout, customizations have been crazy, we couldn’t keep Rapinoe name sets on the shelf. They’ve been flying off the shelf,” said senior assistant manager Ricky Martinez, 27, who said they need to get new orders of her name in every three days.
“We have the whole alphabet, every letter so we can do custom names too, but the Rs, the As, the Ns — like every letter for Rapinoe — we didn’t have for a while.”
He added that Alex Morgan’s name sets are now selling since she made headlines Tuesday by scoring the winning goal against England and celebrated by pretending to drink a cup of tea.
“After yesterday, the Morgan name sets have been going really well,” Martinez said.
Store manager Robbie Baum said the World Cup fever is running higher than even after the team won the World Cup in 2015.
“Even still it did not have the hype this one does,” said Baum, 32.
“Going off of 2015’s [World Cup] the numbers and dollars off it, it’s been miles, miles better. We had a similar assortment of product but the amount of it that is moving is much heavier this year, which I’m glad to see.”