Damn politics. Always getting in the way of a company's ability to sell some top quality sporting memorabilia. UFC comes to Dublin once again this month and fans will certainly want to remember the occasion with a t-shirt or something along those lines. Whether they're going to want to shell-out for this t-shirt is debatable.
Reebok's kit deal with UFC has not been without it's problems so far but they probably thought they'd be fine with some simple merchandise for UFC Dublin. Design a few t-shirts, sell them all and move on to the next destination. That's all well and good but we're not sure how many of these they'll be selling.
Call us partitionist if you will, and from past experience plenty of people will, but that's the shape of the Republic of Ireland, there's no denying that. But that's not to say you go ahead and stick it on a t-shirt that you expect Irish fans to buy. The sales copy is not much better, with 'territorial allegiance' being particularly contentious.
It's rare that you see our fine country shaped like that. From a purely business decision it surely would have been easy to get some advice and just forego the map idea altogether. How about a nice flag and some more crap celtic script?
