Adidas and Nike have a new rival on the soccer pitch

Prince William’s favourite soccer team may be at the forefront of a revolution.

Aston Villa FC 1  has just signed a kit manufacturing deal with US e-commerce specialist Fanatics. While the company is huge on its home turf, operating merchandising for the NHL, NBA, NFL and MLS, it’s little known on the other side of the pond. If the English trial goes well, expect that to change.

Fanatics isn’t like Nike, Adidas or Under Armour . You’ll never see an Aston Villa jersey bearing the Fanatics logo, a red “F” which resembles a waving flag. Instead, the SoftBank-backed company has paid for exclusive licensing rights for all Aston Villa merchandise for several years. It will then sell on separate rights deals for different bits of that merchandise: kit, baseball caps, homewares, and so on. For the matchday jersey, it will be a menswear brand from the club’s home city Birmingham called Luke 1977.

Villa’s pioneering move comes as the bigger brands are doubling down on monster deals with a few top-rank clubs. Those agreements mean that the lowlier teams (Villa has been in England’s second tier the past two years) secure little marketing attention from the sportswear makers. While they snap up all the rights, they often make a much smaller range of kit for everyone apart from the giant teams.

The new Villa jerseys will be made by Fanatics itself. That’s a big shift from classic kit sponsorship deals. While Nike and Adidas design and market soccer gear, they seldom make it, instead contracting a third-party (sometimes Fanatics itself). Premier League champions Manchester City, for instance, are a Nike team but their kit is made by British company Dewhirst Group.

Fanatics, by contrast, controls the whole value chain. It will make the Luke 1977-branded Villa shirts, own the warehouses that store them, and build and run the websites and apps that sell them.  Fanatics is integrated from manufacturing to the point of sale, there are fewer parties taking a slice.