A Brighton shop has bought 120 old Albion shirts, Palookaville one included

Graeme Stokes has bought 120 Brighton & Hove Albion shirts for his shop in Brighton, Global Sports Collectibles^2,3. They date back to the early 1990s. He calls the lot “the motherlode”, the BBC reported.

His favourite, and the one he thinks is rarest, is a dark blue shirt with Palookaville across the front. Stokes said Fatboy Slim “helped the club out when they were in some financial difficulty by sponsoring the shirts”, and that Palookaville was one of his albums. “It tells the story of a local person helping them out when they were a lot smaller club than they are today,” he said.

There is also a training top with the initials GP, which is thought to have been worn by the former manager Gus Poyet. Then there’s a shirt made for Red Nose Day in 2007. The plan was for the players to wear it for one match, sign it and auction it for the charity. The EFL refused permission for the charity sponsor, so the shirts were never worn. They have become collectors’ items.

“The good thing about Brighton from a collectors’ perspective is that they were a much smaller club back then so there weren’t as many of them made,” Stokes said.

He used to be a mental health nurse and started by selling online. He is also a co-founder of the Brighton Sports Cards & Memorabilia Show, which he runs with the collector Kevin Hawthorne.