⚽x🤼 How Charly's Lucha Libre collaboration blends Mexican passions with striking results
⚽x🤼 How Charly's Lucha Libre collaboration blends Mexican passions with striking results
Inside the coolest crossover event of 2022
When the Liga MX Clausura kicks off this weekend, fans will see the familiar colors of Mexico’s historic teams, but sometimes this season they’ll also get a burst of color they might not be expecting.
Six teams in Liga MX will use special edition third shirts as part of Charly Futbol’s “From the ring to the field” collection, which fuses two of the most celebrated sports in Mexico: Soccer and lucha libre.
The team at Charly stays traditional with its designs for clubs’ primary and secondary shirts but is trying to push boundaries with its third shirt, drawing attention both to the teams it sponsors and also its own brand.
“It’s really fun,” said Jesus Salazar, Sports Marketing Manager at Charly. “We’re trying to give fans what they want with the typical colors - let’s say Atlas with its red and black, it’s always going to be there - but we’re also taking advantage of things like the third shirt to try crazier things.
“It’s about always trying to do things outside the box but not so far outside that the fan feels pushed away from the team. We’re providing products that go with the club’s history, but also trying to see if the eyes of the world can look at us as well.”
Other campaigns have succeeded in drawing international attention. Charly’s collaboration with Disney in 2019 to provide Xolos de Tijuana with Star Wars shirts - and a Millennium Falcon to get injured players off the field - went viral.
So too did the shirts Charly created in 2020 for Dia de los Muertos, prompting Salazar and other executives to think about other ways in which the company could put its Mexican heritage on display in a way that would resonate beyond the country’s borders.
With lucha libre promotion AAA celebrating its 30th anniversary, the sportswear brand reached out to the wrestling brand for a collaboration.
“We wanted to explore important cultural themes, and it was mind-blowing for some people that we tried to unite those two sports in a visually attractive way, in a daring way as well that would be something to draw the attention not just of soccer fans here but fans of sports in general,” Salazar said.
That led to an unconventional design process. When it announced the shirts, Charly also launched a luchador for each club built to reflect the personality and identity of each of its partner clubs.
Only after creating those identities, with input from AAA, did the team begin to design the unique mask for each team and, from there, built out the jerseys.
“Those luchadores bring the connection between soccer and lucha libre to life, so when we had those characters we created the masks, which are different on each uniform, we came up with the attitude of each luchador and then used actual wrestlers to portray the luchador for each team,” Salazar said.
Each luchador has a backstory, and there are plans for the wrestlers themselves to make cameos at matches and elsewhere. The original idea, Salazar said, was to link each team with a real-life lucha libre legend, but designers felt fans would connect better to a character designed with their club in mind.
“We were looking to be inspired by the characters we created and also the elements of lucha like the banners, the rustic textures,” Salazar said. While clubs like Tijuana and Santos have their traditional colors in tact, shirts like Atlas’ and Pachuca’s bear little resemblance to the primary jersey.
“This touch of craziness we think makes these jerseys something people will want to collect,” Salazar added. “More than just an alternative shirt for a team, it’s something a lot of fans will want to add to their collection,”
Thanks to Charly’s growing eCommerce network, the brand sells shirts in places like Japan, which also has a long history of professional wrestling, plus England, France, Portugal and various countries in Africa.
Of course, the U.S. is the country where the international focus is the largest.
Charly is a Mexican company, founded in León in 1949 but only pushing heavily into the sportswear and sponsorship space in the last decade. Recently, the company established an office in Los Angeles and is looking to grow internationally. To compete with brands like Nike and Adidas, they’ve looked to add local touches to their designs that draw international attention.
“There’s a balance,” Salazar said between seeking the attention of fans in the U.S. or collectors who might buy a shirt without having any idea who a team’s starting goalkeeper is and making sure local fans have a shirt they can wear to the stadium with pride every other weekend.
Charly hopes they’ve found that balance with this set of jerseys and created something supporters will notice and remember long after this Clausura comes to an end.