Time Out by Simon_Doyle

You'd be forgiven for thinking that a lot of footy players these days lack 'bottle', that vital bravery element that makes them stand out from the rest - but that need not be the case for this year's World Cup, at least for the teams sponsored by Nike.

For the players turning out in kits with the big swoosh will be playing in kits made out of discarded plastic bottles. It's just 94 days 'til the big kick off, and the sports giant has decided to let us in on the fact that the kits have been made from bottles harvested from Japan and Taiwan, which have been melted down into yarn and then spun into fabric. Are they spinning us a yarn?

Teams like Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands, will be out there on the pitch in South Africa wearing jerseys made from recycled polyester, which Nike claims as the most environmentally friendly and technologically advanced kits in football history.

So here's the lowdown on the kits according to Nike: 

- Each shirt comprises up to eight recycled plastic bottles Shirts made in this way reduce energy consumption by up to 30% compared with manufacturing new polyester kits from virgin sources.
- Nike diverted nearly 13 million plastic bottles (or nearly 560,000 pounds of polyester waste) from the landfill - enough to cover more than 29 footy pitches.
-If the recycled bottles used to produce the jerseys were laid end to end, according to Nike, they would span more than 3,000 kilometers (roughly 1,860 miles), a distance that exceeds the entire South African coastline.

If you're  a totally statto, then you can quotes these facts down the pub with your mates. Alternatively, you can sit back and consider all the airmiles that will be clocked up by players, WAGS, media etc and realise that a few million plastic bottles won't make a jot. And god knows about the pollution that will be caused by sweating fans wearing those replica shirts who will effectively be like walking greenhouses. 

I still wonder why no-one has created a football shirt that doesn't make you sweat profusely, even when you're not participating in a game. Fact is, anyone who wears a replica footy kit for more than a few hours is usually humming worst than a Turkish wrestler's jockstrap.