Few football images are as striking as Sunderland fans singing in unison “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis Presley, a 1961 song naturally repurposed into a terrace chant, and it is perhaps precisely for this reason that the Black Cats, ahead of a historic season marking their return to European competition, the Europa League, for the first time in more than fifty years since their only previous appearance, have chosen to unveil a shirt created in collaboration with Elvis.
The King, of course, died in 1977, yet his name and image remain among the most powerful currencies in music and culture, and it is in its own way an unusual partnership, something rarely seen in football, because for most clubs it would make little sense, while Sunderland are not most clubs.
An Away Kit shaped through Elvis’s visual universe therefore feels almost natural, with Hummel, working alongside the Elvis Presley Estate and Authentic Brands Group, settling on pink, a shade that, for those who know the story, recalls the Louisiana Hayride years, the early stage, the first outline of a performer still becoming himself.
Other references run through the design, from a fifties-inspired aesthetic to “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” written on the collar and Elvis’s signature placed like a trace rather than a statement, while the shirt is already available in Sunderland stores and via Fanatics, and will also be sold at Graceland in Memphis, the centre of Elvis’s mythology, alongside a US tour and a lifestyle collection built around the same palette and the same register.
For the launch, supporters were photographed beside a pink Cadillac, another fragment of Presley’s visual language, slightly unreal in a football context, almost too precise to feel accidental, and even the date carries its own weight, 26 June 1977, forty-nine years ago, when Elvis Presley walked on stage at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis for the last time, closing his final performance with “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
