VerifyJersey is a small operation, and being straight about its size is part of the point. Here is exactly what we hold, what happens to your photographs, and what we will not claim.
Every reference in our library is a shirt that has been physically handled and photographed batch by batch — front, back, crest, manufacturer logo, sponsor, neck label, care label, hangtag, fabric, collar. Nothing is scraped from retail listings and nothing is added from customer submissions.
Twenty-two is a small number and we would rather state it than imply a database we don’t have. It grows every time a shirt passes through our hands. What it means in practice: when your shirt matches something we hold, the comparison is genuinely strong, and when it doesn’t, the report tells you that instead of pretending otherwise.
In this order, every time. Several of these steps exist because an earlier version of the system got a real shirt wrong, and we would rather show the repair than hide it.
Before any photo is examined, we search our library for shirts matching what you told us — club, season, home or away, replica or player version, manufacturer. If we hold one, its photographs are placed alongside yours for the comparison. If we don't, the check still runs, but the report says so plainly rather than quietly assessing your shirt against nothing.
First question: are all five photos of the same garment? It sounds trivial, but mixed photo sets are common and they used to produce badly wrong answers — two unrelated codes look like fraud when they are really two different shirts. If the photos don't belong together we stop and ask for corrected ones, and no score is produced at all.
Shirts carry several codes: an article code, a production code, a size code, sometimes a hangtag code. They are not supposed to match each other, and treating them as if they were is a classic way to produce a false accusation. We list each one, note which photo it came from, and only flag a genuine contradiction.
The analysis is returned in a fixed structure and validated on our own servers before it reaches your report. If it claims a reference match we did not actually supply, that claim is removed. If your photos turn out to duplicate our own library images, that is disclosed and not counted as independent evidence. The report you read has been through those checks.
A single percentage hides the thing you most need to know: how much the percentage is worth. We keep them apart deliberately.
1–99
How genuine the shirt appears on the evidence available. Never 0 and never 100, because photographs cannot deliver certainty in either direction and a number that implies they can is dishonest.
Very low → High
How much the first number is worth. A high estimate with very low confidence means the shirt looked fine and we could barely see anything — that is a different situation from a high estimate backed by sharp photos and a matching reference, and you deserve to be able to tell them apart.
None → Exact
Whether we actually had a verified shirt to compare yours against, and how close it was. If this says None, the report is a reasoned opinion about the shirt in isolation — worth having, but not the same as a comparison.
If no verified reference was supplied to the analysis, the report cannot claim one. This is enforced by our own code after the fact, not left to good intentions.
We are not in a position to guarantee origin from photographs, so we don't sell a document that implies we can.
Shirts only enter the library after being handled and photographed in person. Nothing you send us is silently promoted into the evidence used on somebody else's shirt.
Marketplace reputation describes a seller's history across many transactions. It says nothing verifiable about the individual garment, so it is not treated as evidence in any finding.
Replica is the licensed retail tier that most fans own. Counterfeit means unlicensed. Conflating them frightens people out of perfectly genuine shirts.
The largest limit is the one no method can remove: photographs can find contradictions, but they cannot establish where a garment was made. A shirt that survives every check might be genuine, or might be a very good counterfeit. When a case reaches that point we record it as unresolved — here is one we could not settle, published in full.
Two shirts examined in public, photograph by photograph — or send us yours.