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After bursting onto the scene a year ago, the Queensland Football Club has grown into a successful sports franchise with legions of fans, except you won’t see their team on the pitch anywhere in Australia.
At least, in the sense of playing a professional sport, founder Ken Sakata has created a team-based clothing brand that repeatedly sells his casual wear, and it all started as a joke.
“For the last year I’ve been selling sporting goods for a football team that doesn’t exist… I feel like I should explain it,” he said in a recent TikTok video.
The businessman, based in Melbourne’s South Yarra, said that during the Covid pandemic, which saw his home and the heart of Australia’s AFL win the record for the most days in lockdown with 262, he was “losing his mind.” head” and needed something to occupy it.
“While everyone was posting about…everything, I was posting about soccer,” he explained.
Melbourne’s Ken Sakata (pictured) has built a successful clothing company based on the non-existent Queensland FC.
Fans are scrambling for merchandise with merchandise like T-shirts and hoodies (pictured) repeatedly selling out.
“Specifically about how I got too stressed out and was going to drop my responsibilities and become a professional soccer player at the age of 35.”
What followed was a flurry of posts detailing Ken’s strict diet, training regimen and his thoughts on football strategy.
“I have never played football in my life,” he said.
The person, like the team, was just a creative outlet.
Despite this, the popularity of the account grew and when he released a tongue-in-cheek T-shirt visualizing his dream of being an AFL player, it sold like hotcakes.
‘I bought a Gold Coast Suns jersey for $30 on eBay. I was too cheap to buy the shorts, so I’m only short from the waist up.
The idea came after he posted a tongue-in-cheek T-shirt visualizing his soccer dream (pictured)
The article caught the attention of the AFL’s lawyers and the T-shirt company received a “cease and desist” letter advising against using its intellectual assets.
“So we stopped selling the jersey, but at that point, within a week, we had sold $2,000 of my merchandise,” he said.
By then, people struggling to put on an original Sakata jersey had given him an idea.
“I didn’t know exactly what the next step was other than obviously selling more sporting goods,” he said.
“I thought what would happen if it weren’t for a club that I have intellectual rights to.”
And so Queensland FC was born.
Commenters overwhelmingly supported the brilliant business idea.
Even knowing that it started out as silly doesn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm.
Sakata has described the team as ‘post-ironic’ with punters in on the joke
Sakata uses local Australian fabric and says they aim to make the best quality leisure sportswear.
“It’s been a year and I find myself in this strange position of running a post-ironic merchandise company,” he said.
‘I have spent 12 months learning about materials, construction and design.’
“I make things locally and buy hundreds of yards of Australian fabric to try to make the best sports merchandise the nation has ever seen… for a fake football club.”
His candid admission was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
“This is my favorite business story,” said one person.
‘This is fantastic. Now you need a fictional cult hero whose last name can go on the back of your number 10 jerseys,” said another.
‘At some point, the players will show up and form a team, right? That is the logical conclusion,” added a third.
Some commentators drew comparisons to the popular Apple TV sitcom Ted Lasso.
Others compared him to actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and their ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ series, which, it should be noted, is a real team.
Sakata said he has no plans to liquidate the business, using money from one merchandise to finance the next.
There has been the occasional shutdown of Facebook, but he admits that while his fake team is “weird,” he’s not breaking any laws.
Its objective? Simply so that the ‘club’ he founded can continue.
“A woman from Switzerland just tagged me in a video wearing her Queensland FC hoodie,” he recently wrote on Twitter.
‘May Cry’.