Made in Bangladesh: Cape Verde’s 2026 World Cup Jersey
30 June 2026: When the Blue Sharks held the European champions to a 0-0 draw in Atlanta on 15 June – their first World Cup match ever and one of the biggest upsets the tournament has produced – the jerseys on their backs carried a “Made in Bangladesh” label. No Bangladeshi team qualified for the 48-nation tournament. Its factories turned up anyway.
Garments Manufacturing and Assembling Ltd. (GMA) is a knitwear and athletic-apparel factory in Turag, on the northern edge of Dhaka, founded in 2019. It has made sportswear from the start, shipping to the US, Germany and Chile – but until this summer it had never produced player jerseys for a World Cup.
The chain runs like this. Capelli Sport signed a four-year deal to outfit Cape Verde’s men’s and women’s teams, then placed its jersey order with GMA in January. GMA delivered in March. In total, the factory sent 5,000 match-grade player jerseys and another 13,000 fan jerseys – kits for several nations, not just Cape Verde – out through Capelli. The performance fabric, Coolmax, came from the Dhaka plant of Youngone Corporation, which imports the specialist yarn and supplies it on.
The kit itself was designed around something specific: a geometric pattern that traces the flight paths linking Cape Verde’s ten islands. It was unveiled in April, weeks before anyone expected the team to take a point off Spain.
Why the kits come from Bangladesh, not just China
Ask most people where football shirts are made and they’ll say China. They’re half right. Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest garment exporter, behind China – though Vietnam is now within a few billion dollars and closing fast (WTO data put Bangladesh at $38.5 billion in 2024 against Vietnam’s $33.9 billion). A serious share of the global football-jersey trade runs through its factories.
The pull is simple economics. Brands want high volume, low unit cost and quality control tight enough to put a national crest on it. Bangladeshi manufacturers – Youngone, DBL Group and others – deliver all three at a scale few countries can match, using techniques like laser cutting and heat-locked printing that match what the big brands demand. The result: both “player version” kits (the technical shirts athletes actually wear) and “fan version” replicas ship out of Dhaka to Europe, the US and the Middle East.
Bangladesh-made kits have picked up a following among European fans – younger supporters who travel to club football and cricket matches and end up wearing shirts stitched a continent away from the team they support.
Bangladesh accounts for a fixed slice – often “18%” – of global football-jersey manufacturing. That specific number is hard to source and worth treating as a ballpark. What’s solid is the broader fact: Bangladesh is the second-biggest apparel exporter on the planet, and football kit is a growing line item in that total.
The brand battle on the pitch
The 2026 World Cup is a story of concentration. Of the 48 teams, 37 – about 77% – wear Nike, Adidas or Puma. Adidas leads with 14 nations, Nike has 12, Puma 11. That leaves just 11 teams split across smaller labels, a few of them barely known outside their home market: 7Saber kits Uzbekistan, Majid produces Iran’s shirts.
Capelli Sport sits in that long tail, and its presence is its own underdog tale. The brand started in 2011 to solve a problem – a New Jersey youth soccer founder couldn’t get the exact green he wanted from the big manufacturers, so he made the kits himself. Fifteen years later it outfits more than 100 pro teams and 400,000-plus youth athletes.
For Bangladesh, the strategic read is less about any single shirt and more about category. The country is pushing up the value chain – into technical textiles and athleisure, a segment forecast to grow around 6.7% a year through 2030, and helped by having more LEED-certified green factories than any other country. Performance sportswear is a high-value lane inside BGMEA’s stated goal of $100 billion in garment exports by 2030, against roughly $40 billion today.
