The workers earning less than £1 an hour to make official UK football shirts

Football shirts are how lots of fans show their love for their club, but a BBC Sport investigation has revealed many of the people who make them are paid less than £1 an hour, working in conditions campaign groups call "unacceptable".

BBC Sport's Tom Grundy told Newsround they spent a year tracking down the factories where official football shirts are made.

"In Cambodia, we found shirts for some of the world's biggest teams, including those made for children.

Speaking to the workers, it was clear that life wasn't easy for them. They wanted the people buying these shirts thousands of miles away to hear their stories."

Official football shirts can cost up to £120 for adults and £70 for child sizes.

BBC Sport followed authentic replica shirts to two factories in Cambodia.

Images taken from inside Bowker Garment Factory and Trax Apparel factory show kits being made for clubs including Arsenal, Celtic, Liverpool and Real Madrid.

Adidas, which produces the teams kit does not own either factory, but both are primary suppliers, which means they should follow its workplace standards.

Workers told the BBC they were paid less than £1 an hour.

Although it was within local minimum wage, they told the BBC there was little left after living expenses.

One Bowker worker said: "It's hard to live with this amount".

Adidas said staff in Cambodia were "usually paid considerably higher than the local minimum wage".

Bowker did not respond to BBC Sport's request for comment.

Factory staff told BBC Sport about working in temperatures above 35C described by one campaign group as "intense heat", and how workers are shouted at if they don't work fast enough.

In the factories teams are given targets to try to reach; for example making a certain number of shirts or a parts of a shirt in a certain amount of time.

Each person usually works on just one part of the clothing - sewing and assembling it - meaning each item of clothing is made by a group of workers.

Workers told the BBC about the pressure having to make between 300 and 700 items a day as a group - roughly 40 to 90 pieces an hour.

"When we can't complete the quota they scold and yell at us" a worker at Bowker said.

Anna Bryher, from UK campaign group Labour Behind the Label told BBC Sport

"I think that workers working under extreme pressure, in often intense heat, where there isn't cooling or paid breaks or enough to be able to work with dignity — that again is unacceptable."

Adidas said both factories had "heat-management measures", that its standards "do not permit any form of harassment".

Trax acknowledged "periods of elevated temperature" but said cooling systems were in place and insisted its approach "is not based on enforcing output targets".

But concerns are widespread across Cambodia's garment industry, with a 2024 International Labour Organization report, finding 69% of factories had issues with heat and 84% with worker protection.

Adidas isn't the only official kit supplier, but it supplies eight of the 20 Premier League clubs, plus the national sides of Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Emma Vogt from the Clean Clothes campaign, which campaigns for garment industry workers rights, said that the findings of the investigation were not unusual:

"These are issues that many garment workers around the world face every day," she said.

The average price of an adult replica Premier League shirt has risen by 50.7% in the past ten years, with an adult shirt costing on average around £80.

The report reveals the big difference between the high price of a shirt to buy and how little money some workers get to make them.

"Unfortunately, that high price doesn't guarantee anything about working conditions," Emma told BBC Sport.

She called on fans to speak out to the brands they're buying from.

"Tell your club what you think about that and ask them how they're planning to do better."

Anna Bryher, from UK campaign group Labour Behind the Label, said clubs should ensure workers are treated with respect.

"Respect has got to be a baseline in sport, and it's something that loads of these clubs really stand for, and I think that they need to feed that through their merchandising."