An Olympique Lyonnais 2024/25 home shirt, and a removal we could not verify

The shirt examined here belongs to the person who operates VerifyJersey and who wrote this review. He believes the shirt is genuine. A review of an item the reviewer owns and has already formed a view about is not a neutral starting position, and readers should weigh it accordingly — the report below is structured to separate what he believes from what the evidence shows, but it cannot remove that interest.

The seller is not named here. The review was prompted by that seller, who asked the reviewer to look at the shirt after the marketplace removed their listing. They have not been asked to comment on the findings below and have had no opportunity to respond to them, and naming a business in connection with a counterfeit allegation on that basis would be unfair to them. The owner regards the seller as reliable on the basis of their marketplace feedback — but seller reputation is context about a seller, not evidence about any individual garment, and it carries no weight in the findings below. VerifyJersey has no commercial relationship with the seller of this shirt.

The documentary record on this shirt is coherent. Article code IT6493 appears on the woven internal label and again on the cardboard hangtag, and it is the article number adidas publishes for the Olympique Lyonnais 24/25 Home Jersey in white. Four further values on the hangtag — the product abbreviation, the colour, the €100 original price and the 2023 copyright line — align with that same record, and two design details, the two-rivers flank inserts and the “Entre Rhône & Saône” interior sign-off, match adidas’ own description of the design. The February 2024 production code sits sensibly ahead of a 2024/25 season launch. The care label carries adidas’ European address and its registered RN and CA numbers, without the small textual errors that often surface on copied labelling.

Nothing observed across the twelve photographs contradicts adidas’ record for this product. No wrong code, no mismatched season, no misspelled label, no substituted print where embroidery is expected.

That is a materially weaker statement than “this shirt is genuine”, and the difference is the whole point of this case. In the Manchester City case published alongside this one, the evidence pointed somewhere because a code was wrong; a wrong code is checkable and damning. A right code is not the mirror image of that, because a right code is exactly what a counterfeiter copies first. Every corroborating detail listed above is public information, printed on a garment by whoever made it. The photographic record here is consistent with a genuine adidas shirt and equally consistent with a well-executed counterfeit, and this review has no way to distinguish between them.

So this case closes unresolved, and deliberately so. The owner’s statement that the shirt is genuine is recorded as his account, not adopted as a finding. The reported listing removal is recorded as the seller’s account, unverified, and is not treated as evidence of counterfeiting. What would actually move this case is not more photographs: it is scanning the hangtag barcode and QR code, reading the RFID chip, and comparing the garment physically against a confirmed-genuine IT6493. None of that was done here, and until it is, the honest answer is that the question remains open.

Reviewer: VerifyJersey · Case status: contested, unresolved

A marketplace and this review looked at the same shirt and produced very differently shaped answers. One removed a listing — an action that reads as a determination. The other worked through twelve photographs, found nothing that contradicts adidas’ record, and still declined to call it.

That difference is about confidence, not about who is right. Neither party has been shown correct here, and this report does not claim the removal was mistaken — it claims only that the photographic evidence available cannot settle the question either way. Marketplaces also operate under constraints this review does not: they moderate at enormous scale, act on listing text and imagery rather than the garment, and must err toward removal because the cost of hosting a counterfeit is borne by a buyer who cannot inspect anything. Fast, cautious, automated enforcement is a reasonable response to that problem.

What it is not is an examination of an item. The distinction worth holding onto is between a decision made about a listing and a finding made about a garment. A seller told their listing breached counterfeit policy has not been told their shirt is fake, and an owner whose shirt survives a documentary review has not been told it is genuine. Both statements are narrower than they feel, and treating either as a verdict is where most disputes of this kind go wrong.