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The men’s team were wearing the black jersey after winning against Qatar and South Africa earlier in the tournament.Fran Santiago/Getty Images
The line began forming just after 11 a.m. last Saturday.
There was no official announcement. Yet somehow, through word of mouth and right-place-at-the-right-time luck, news spread that the Sport Chek store in downtown Vancouver had received a surprise shipment of what, in this World Cup season, has quickly become one of the country’s most coveted – and hard-to-get – items: a black “away” version of the Team Canada jersey.
Before the boxes were even unpacked, a lineup of about 40 people had snaked around the second floor of the store. They sold out almost all of the 500 jerseys by day’s end.
“It’s the busiest I’ve ever seen this store – busier even than the Olympics,” said store manager Bruce Haug. Just two weeks earlier, the store went through almost 2,700 jerseys in a day. And on the official Nike website, where the jersey retails for $135, the black shirt, too, has been consistently sold out.
Just as the success of Team Canada at the World Cup has taken the world by surprise, so too has the jersey. As the Canadian team went from unlikely underdog to one historic win after another, the black jersey has risen as a symbol of the squad’s – and country’s – stealth strength and quiet perseverance.
After Team Canada’s jerseys were first released in March of this year (red for home games and black for away games), the designs were met with polite, perfunctory praise. The latter jersey features a white, etched Maple Leaf design against a black background, as though scratched onto dark ice.
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But all of that changed on June 18 when Team Canada took on Qatar in the Group B match. Canada made history with its first-ever World Cup win. The images from that game, with Team Canada dressed in the black jerseys, became instantly iconic.
“Six-nothing winning [in] the World Cup in that jersey. That’s got to be good luck, right?” said Vinny Bralo, manager of Soccer World Central, a store in Toronto. It was enough to excite the most superstitious of sports fans.
Ten days later, when Canada won again against South Africa – once again wearing the black jerseys – it seemed to cement the idea that the shirts were lucky.
“They’ve been sold out like crazy” since, Mr. Bralo said. All of the Team Canada merch has been popular, he said. “But the black one’s been the hot one for sure.”
With the Canadian team planning to wear black once again in Saturday’s Round of 16 game against Morocco, it’s likely to drive up demand even more.
Across town at Pro League Sports in Toronto, owner Tex Thomas said he hasn’t been able to keep the black jerseys on the shelves.
“Champs. Foot Locker. Sport Chek. Everybody is completely sold out,” he said.
Each day over the past few weeks, he’s arrived at the store to find 40 to 50 messages on his voicemail.
“They’re all asking, ‘Do you have any of the black jerseys left today?’ ”
The designer behind the jersey is Holly Gallacher, a Scottish-Canadian who lives in Calgary and worked from 2021 to 2024 as a senior designer at Nike. When she first began working on the jerseys in 2022, she said one of the main messages the athletes reiterated was that they felt confident in black.
“It made them feel powerful,” she told The Globe and Mail. “One of them said, ‘We feel like killers when we wear black,’ ” she said. “Another was like, ‘You wear black to a funeral, and that’s what we want the other team to feel.’ ”
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Ms. Gallacher and her team liked the symbolism of black, too. “When you think of Canada, you think of red and white, right?” she said. “So, we liked the unexpectedness of black.”
Internally, her team at Nike began referring to the design as “black ice.” To represent Canada, ice seemed obvious. Cold winters. Rough terrain. There was also that other iconic Team Canada moment in 2021, when, during a freezing-cold World Cup qualifying match in Edmonton, several members of the Canadian team jumped into the snow to celebrate a goal.
“With black ice, you don’t see it coming, it’s dangerous,” she said. “You only realize it’s there after the fact. After it’s done damage.”
At the Sport Chek store in Vancouver, Mr. Haub said they’re once again sold out of the black jerseys. Luckily, he said, most shoppers have reacted reasonably.
As with their view on the tournament – as with their view on Team Canada’s performance – most shoppers have come in without any expectations set in stone.
“Everyone still seems to be in a pretty good mood,” Mr. Haub said.