I grew up watching football with my brothers and waiting all year for Wimbledon. My boys play football and cricket now and watching that happen has been the best thing I’ve ever done as a parent.

I grew up with two brothers who were mad about football. Sundays in our house meant a match on, whoever wasn’t playing was watching, and that was just how the day went. I played tennis myself, a different sport, same intensity and Wimbledon was the two weeks I waited for all year, every year.

The football team my eldest supports isn’t one he picked himself, it’s the one my brother supported, handed down the way these things tend to get handed down in families, somewhere between a joke and a tradition nobody questions. Nobody sat him down and explained the rivalry. He just grew up inside it, the same way I grew up inside Sunday afternoons with the match always on.

Watching that happen, watching both my boys grow into sport the way I did, has been the best thing I’ve ever done as a parent. Not the only good thing. The best.

I make personalised baby clothes built around that idea and this is the thinking behind them, not just the sales pitch.

So when I make a “My First World Cup” gift, that’s actually what I’m trying to put into it. Not a tournament souvenir. A small, early piece of something that, if it goes the way it went in my family, turns into a kid who actually plays, actually supports, actually inherits the whole thing without ever being formally told to.

Most World Cup baby gifts aren’t really about that

Search for one and you’ll find a lot of the same idea: a generic ball print, a slogan that could belong to any baby, made to be worn for a few photos during the tournament and outgrown into a drawer by the time it’s over. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what I was trying to make.

What I make instead is something that says this baby belongs to this family’s sport, not “this baby might like football one day.” It’s the hand-me-down, just starting a generation earlier than usual. Personalised with baby’s name, made in the UK.

How they’re actually made

There’s no warehouse involved. No pre-printed stock sitting in boxes, no production line. Every single one is cut and pressed by me, after you order it, which means the one your baby wears was made because you bought it, not picked off a shelf where it had been sitting for months.

That slows me down, and I’ve made peace with that. What it gives me instead is control over the details that actually matter: I use 100% cotton, the kind I’d genuinely put my own kids in, not the cheapest blank I could find online. The designs are mine, not bought in from a template pack, built around an image and a pun you won’t have already seen on the fourth nearly-identical “England Baby” listing you scrolled past to get here.

If you’ve ever bought a personalised gift and had the nagging feeling it was the same item as fifty other shops, just with a different name swapped in, that’s the gift I am trying not to make.

Why it matters after the final whistle, too

A baby doesn’t stop belonging to their family’s sport, once a tournament ends. If anything the gift means more with time. The photo of a baby in their first sport identity clothing, kept long after anyone remembers who won the group stage, sitting in a box that one day might genuinely be the first thing of its kind for a kid who ends up playing. A sport, handed down properly, by a brother, an uncle, a parent.

You don’t have to be the football-mad one to get this right

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re not buying for your own kids. You’re buying for a brother, a friend, a colleague, someone whose family has a team the way mine does, even if it’s not yours. That can feel like the hard part of gift-buying: knowing there’s a “right” answer and not being sure you know it.

The good news is, you don’t need to know the offside rule or care who’s top of the group to get this one right. You just need to know one thing: which sport matters to them. Ask, if you’re not sure, most people will happily tell you, and most will be quietly touched that you asked at all. Everything else, the part that actually makes the gift feel considered rather than safe, takes care of itself once you’ve got that.

That’s really the whole idea. The gift doesn’t need you to be a football person. It just needs to be right for the family it’s going to.

Where to find one

Runs In The Family – personalised, made to order, dispatched in 1-2 days, across a range of qualifying nations. Cut, pressed, and packaged by hand.