Joe is an Aberdeen based Nottingham Forest, Scotland and now his local team, Montrose FC, supporter whose love for football shirts led to him attempting the seemingly impossible, owning a shirt from every FIFA registered nation!

What made you want to collect a shirt from every FIFA nation?

I started wondering about it after I bought a couple of international shirts in a charity shop, a Scotland training top and, somewhat exotically, a Slovenia shirt, then realised I had an Argentina shirt already and that was a collection of three, so would it be possible to collect them all? I did a bit of Googling and found there were 208 registered teams in FIFA (Gibraltar, Kosovo and South Sudan have all joined since then) that seemed like a lot, and maybe it was a silly idea and I ought to stop thinking about it there and then, but the thought wouldn't go away, and soon I was on eBay buying £2 second-hand Croatia, Ireland, and France shirts. Pretty soon it got out of hand and my whole room was covered, there was brightly coloured polyester hanging from every available hook and my flatmate thought I had gone funny in the head.

As a result of the collecting I found myself increasingly engrossed by international football and the sport's global reach; there's a fascinating link between football and national identity - having a team is a statement of nationhood. Every country has a team, no matter how small, or how isolated from the rest of the world. North Korea, Bhutan, Comoros, Tonga, Djibouti, Turkmenistan... they all play and they all have to have a team, even if they know they'll probably never reach a World Cup. As a result all the disputed states like Tibet set up their own non-FIFA national teams as a statement about their status as a 'real' country. I think football is the only sport where that's the case. I find it really interesting.

What was the first piece in your collection and when did you buy it?

The very first one was an Argentina away shirt I bought from eBay just after the 2010 World Cup. I have always liked Argentina and had long thought that their away kits in particular were super cool, right back to the 1998 World Cup. I was a big fan of the 2006 away shirt and there was one for about £20, so that was the one I went for. Somehow, even now, I've still never bought the '98 shirt. I'll pop that on the "to do" list.

How many pieces do you now have in your collection?

I now have about 500 shirts all stored in a rather large wardrobe under the stairs.

Which items are the most important pieces to you and which were the more difficult to acquire?

That's difficult to narrow down to just one. I'm pretty fond of an Azerbaijan U-17s shirt that was on eBay with a load of signatures and writing all over it which I managed to identify as having been presented to Pope Benedict XVI at an obscure tournament in Italy. It was about £40 in the end, the seller obviously hadn't take the time to unravel the story behind it, so that's quite a special one.

Another eBay score that I'm really glad to have is the matchworn shirt of goalscorer Dorji Tshering from Bhutan's most famous victory which took them through to the actual first round of World Cup Qualifying a couple of years ago - it was a game that got a huge amount of press attention across the world. Not one of the hardest though in terms of actually getting hold of it, thanks to eBay.

About halfway through the quest things got very difficult as I was left with teams that didn't bother producing replica shirts, either due to financial conditions or a lack of interest inside the country. Then I was left trying to contact players, or buy matchworns for a lot of money on the rare occasions that they would turn up on eBay or in Facebook groups. Soon after starting I found there were a few other guys online trying to reach the same goal, and we formed a little friendship group and network who would help each other out whenever we managed to source something rare. I imported a load of Malawi shirts from a sports shop over there, for example, and then distributed them among other collectors. One guy in Canada put me on to someone in the Eritrean diaspora in Amsterdam who had a national shirt from one of the players who claimed asylum after a match in Uganda and ended up in the Netherlands. I paid £300 for that one, and a few days later it turned up all scrunched up in an envelope.

The most difficult of all was probably Sudan ; I couldn't find a way of contacting any of their players as Google Translate isn't much good for Arabic and I couldn't find any of their players on Facebook. I ended up asking the UK ambassador in Sudan, Michael Aron, if there was any way he could help me as I noticed on Twitter that he had described himself as a Gooner, meaning he was interested in football, and that he had linked to a couple of articles about the power of sport to unite different cultures, which is part of what my quest is all about. He replied to my email very promptly saying he would try to help, but he found very quickly that there are no official replicas. I didn't hear from him for another year, when he got in touch to let me know he had managed to get me an official shirt from the owner of one of Sudan's biggest club teams and he then sent it to me when he was visiting the UK. A very nice thing of him to do, and I really don't know how else I would have ever managed to get a Sudan shirt.

I also have to mention my Republic of Congo shirt, which was sent to me as a gift by the country's captain Prince Oniangue, who was playing for Wolves at the time. We spoke on Facebook for a while and eventually it just showed up in the post one day with a lovely hand-written note from him. It's his shirt from the 2015 African Cup of Nations with the patches and everything. That was so kind of him.

If you could add any piece to your collection, what would it be and why?

For years, the answer to that would have been easy - a genuine Somalia shirt. I got one several years ago and it turned out to be a fake, so I tried all kinds of avenues to get a real one. I emailed their FA, various football officials, their kitman... I even found a player on Facebook a couple of years ago who was willing to sell me one, and I wired him the money, but when he took it to DHL to send he found you're not allowed to post anything other than documents out of the country. Then a few weeks ago a brilliant collector friend in Canada managed to source 3 of them from an official who worked with the team last year, and finally I got my hands on one (even better, an unused sub's shirt from their first ever World Cup qualifier win!). That was a brilliant feeling, after nearly a decade of searching.

I guess now my most wanted would be either a matchworn Sri Lanka shirt, specifically their recent design that's kind of yellowy orange and features a lion's face on one of the shoulders (their nickname is the Golden Lions) or Botswana's wonderful Al-Kasi shirt from 2011/12, which is light blue but with this cool black and white swirl down one side. It's just a killer design, and I had the chance to buy one at the time and didn't go for it, and I have always regretted that.

What have some of your more recent additions to the collection been?

Recently I've been buying lots of Scotland shirts. They're my team, and I now have somewhere in the region of 30-35 shirts. I've got a few matchworns of Colin Hendry and Colin Calderwood. I just got the 1986 top actually, a bit before my frame of interest (I'm a 90s kid and I love the crazy fashion from that time), but it's fairly rare and my oldest Scotland shirt so far so I'm happy to have it.

Do you have a favourite shirt in your collection?

People often ask me what my favourite shirt is. I have many favourites, either because of the designs or the stories behind them, but my overall favourite purely for how cool it looks is my player issue Tajikistan shirt. It's black with blue trim and a green line across the top and it just looks totally badass. It's very rare too. As far as I can work out the team only seem to have worn it once, and that was the Under-22s in a game against Iran a few years ago; there were never any replicas of this design and I've never seen another one in any other collection. Anyway, the collector I got it from has nicknamed it 'the Tron shirt' because of the way it looks and I think that's just about right!

Do you have any interesting stories regarding your collection?

Well, when I bought those two shirts in Oxfam that day I never expected to end up on TV talking about a collection of 500 shirts or to have Radio 5 Live phoning me up before the 2018 World Cup for a repeat appearance to chat about football fashion! When I finally got Madagascar I had a shirt for every FIFA nation and loads of press agents got in touch. I went on telly twice and three radio stations, and I was in newspapers and on news websites as far away as Albania and Algeria; it was a mad couple of weeks!

There are a lot more people who decide to try and collect them all these days and I get people emailing me fairly frequently asking for advice. I think it's certainly a lot easier than when I started ten years ago. There's definitely been a huge surge in shirt collecting and interest in retro shirts in general, and as a result there are lots of websites, notably CFS, that actively go out and try and get small countries to produce replicas for sale. So whereas it used to be impossible to find a Samoa shirt, or Eritrea or Turkmenistan, you can now order them with a couple of clicks of your mouse. In some ways that's certainly absolutely great (I just bought a Northern Mariana Islands shirt from CFS that would have previously been utterly impossible to find) but it does perhaps take a little of the "quest" element out of it. I have loads of stories, like the when Dean Mason, a non-League player in England, got a call-up for Montserrat and brought me back a shirt from the game, or my Turkmenistan shirt that was smuggled out of the famously closed country by a contact in eastern Europe. It's all on my blog; I love writing so have done a detailed post about every shirt on my website. Sometimes there's a story, sometimes I just put a few facts or sometimes I just make up a load of rubbish jokes that amuse me. It's a nice way to be creative.

There's a hugely active kit community on Twitter that I'm part of; you can find me on there as @GlobalObsession , and I'd heartily encourage any kit collector to get involved. I also have my own Youtube channel featuring some random shirt videos, my TV appearances, a short film I made where I wear all the shirts called 'The Magic Shirt' and a half-hour documentary I made about the shirts of Central Asia that I put together as part of an occasional web series I concocted called 'What's in the Wardrobe?' Hopefully I'll find time to do some more episodes in the future. You can find the channel here.

What is next for your collection?

Well there are loads of national teams playing outwith the auspices of FIFA. I have quite a few already, but I'll probably add a few more of those. I've tried to scale back the amount I buy but it's quite addictive so I'll probably still be adding to the collection. As I say, I'm on a bit of a Scotland binge at the moment. I'm proud to have been asked to display a selection of the shirts at KitCon 2020, Scotland's first football shirt convention, which is taking place at Murrayfield in March. I'd like to do a full exhibition at some point, although the logistics are sort of complicated! I've also always wondered about doing a book about them. Any publishers reading who think it's interesting please get in touch!

If you would like to see more of Joe's collection, follow him on Instagram here

Check out our lesser known International Team collection here

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