Europe’s Man-Style Red Carpet: Global Soccer Stars Kick Off The Off-Season Fashion Show

Now that England’s storied Premier League championship has been won for an unprecedented fourth straight year by Manchester City on May 19, which is to say, by the feisty Catalan super-tactician Josep “Pep” Guardiola Sala and his merry band of talented and (in Europe) famous ballers, we can look forward in the next weeks to a series of really excellent off-duty man-style fashion moments as paraded by Guardiola’s key stars, namely, Erling Haaland, ingenue Phil Foden, midfielder Kyle Walker and by no means least, Man City’s party-heartiest player, Jack Grealish, pictured above getting a beer infusion on the field, moments after being awarded the Premier League trophy.

Pouring any amount of alcohol in any form down Grealish has become a bracing totem-like habit for Manchester City players, which is logical because it was Grealish who, during this same post-championship break in 2023, set the bar for partying on a three-week continental bender so epic that it entered British drinking parlance as doing a “full Grealish.” Parenthetically, Grealish moved from Aston Villa to Manchester in 2021 on a six-year contract for a reported $127 million and is a central cog in Pep Guardiola’s well-oiled dreadnought. But it’s his play and his headlong off-duty gyrations — diplomatically put, his ‘lifestyle’ — that put him squarely in the hearts of Mancunians.

This year, the May 19 championship dinner was held at the glammy Manchester standby FENIX (sic), and, reportedly, the after-party ran till 5 a.m. on May 20. Ever the fashion plate, Grealish wore a trademark patterned “play-suit” by Gucci to the affair, which retails according to reports somewhere north of $2500. The play-suit is a thing that has trended high among athletes in the last few years, worn notably, also, by American football star and current Mr. Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, pictured below.

The trick with the play-suit is that it has a (somewhat) traditional set of trousers but it replaces the matching suit jacket with a thing that, in the Seventies, was called a “shirt-jac,” or a shirt-cut jacket made from the same suiting material as the trousers, something like a jeans jacket but longer. While we can say that the play-suit owes something to Mexico’s mucho mas cojones guayabera shirt and to the “summer” Mao-in-repose upper-body tailoring favored by North Korean despot Kim Jong Un, the current iteration of the man-style play-suit owes more than a little to the costume for several Bond villains, notably the SPECTRE head Rosa Klebb, played with deadly Central European elan by no less an actress than the legendary Lotte Lenya (aka, Mrs. Kurt Weill) in the second Bond film, From Russia With Love. The Austrian/American anti-fascist and emigre actress is pictured below, as Klebb, in a dashing Coco Chanel-inflected shirt-jac paired with a regulation terrifying SPECTRE/world-domination/Bryn-Mawr-librarian skirt on that set in 1963.

Below, a shot of the fashion plate Grealish, as the British tabloids would put it, “slightly the worse for wear,” exiting Ibiza’s renowned Ocean Beach Club in one of his favored patterned play-suits by Gucci, this shirt-jac over a pair of climate-change appropriate matching shorts on the morning of July 6, 2023, after a celebration with some select teammates of Man City’s history-making “treble” championship. Grealish is also a fan of sliders at any hour of the day or night — we can’t be absolutely sure, but this pair appear to be Gucci as well. Man-style Note: On the field or off, true footie stars are by definition always en route to or from a locker room, and in the locker room there is no footwear but sliders.

Be that as it may, Grealish must be saluted with a huge tip of the hat for pairing his sliders with cozy, dead-white socks. It’s a full-Grealish tic. First, the contrasting socks bring a nice locker-room breeze to the evening look. Second, after a long party, they help refract light to augment sure footing in the dawn gloaming, whether or not the man is at that point able to see, or even register, his feet as his feet. Third, with Grealish, one suspects it’s likely that his mother told him en route to a game when he was ten that a pair of solid, unapologetic white socks would always help him defend against the scourge of athlete’s foot.

The point is, doing a full Grealish in the man-style sense, as many thousands of young men across the world will now be attempting, simply will not be possible without the white socks. The man has set the bar. Period.

The gentlemen to either side of Grealish are central-casting, making sure that the onboarding transfer process of the valuable player from the renowned nightclub into the waiting Mercedes SUV is a seamless affair. He may be semi-legless in this moment, but those legs are a $127-million product, after all.

For the record, and for a sense of the punishing athletic regime of Grealish’s 2o23 championship bender, below is a shot of the midfielder on July 7, or about 24 hours after the above photograph, heading to yet another nightclub in yet another play-suit, this shirt-jac with three-quarter sleeves, and the shirt front left rakishly open. Like all professional athletes, Grealish does spend a lot of time off the field parading around in his birthday suit in front of hundreds of people in jammed locker rooms, so he’s comfortable that way, but this particular party costume is of a different order.

Hands down, it’s the most manly and confident way to do a play-suit, and the gleaming white bucket topper matching the trademark white socks simultaneously brackets and pulls the outfit apart in a sort of tug-of-war (of white) at both ends. However! Shirt-front open or not, as a style move, we can debate the insouciant display of the — again, blaze-white — Calvin Klein grippers giving a good three inches before the beltline of the play-suit thankfully interrupts to cover the presumably prominent sack of man-junk that grippers insist on offering.

We can chalk this stylistic move up to English football’s very own original fashion plate and template, David Beckham, and his years of aggressively promoting his junk as encased in Emporio Armani grippers on hundred-foot-long billboard ads over Times Square, and pretty much every where else in the known world. As a man-style brand-meister, Beckham led the way in underwear/junk profiling for generations of soccer players, most especially in Europe, where tight, really uncomfortable-looking menswear is beloved.

In this way, Grealish is a direct man-style descendant of Beckham’s. The message out there on the dusty Spanish road leading to the inevitable disco is, Grealish’s date to Ibiza’s Ushuaia club, where he wound up in this costume, was his abs.

In the deepest sense, stylistically, the crucial detail about Grealish and his unflinching strength while on his weeks-long off-duty death-march-bender-fashion-trek last year is that he proved he could do the walk of shame for weeks on end, with not so much as an ounce of shame. That is man-strength. What more could we ask for in an off-season peacock-strut? Nothing. Down to his highly select Beckham-style bleached highlights, Jack Grealish is a perfectly dressed man.

Below, a fetching paparazzi grab of him exiting the Ushuaia club hours later. Sadly, he appears to have lost his bucket, which he doesn’t seem to mind particularly, but we can still hope that his omnipresent bodyguard has it safe.

In contrast to Grealish, Man City striker Erling Haaland and his longtime steady, Isabel Hauseng Johansen, staged a more sedate but nevertheless coiled, lion-in-repose off-duty appearance, below. We examined this fetching pair during last-year’s remarkable off-season, when this shot was taken. The pair looked eminently respectable, despite Haaland’s slightly challenged look in the evening-eyewear department, at a Dolce & Gabbano event in Bari, Italy, last July, after Manchester City won the Premier League, the Football Association Cup, the Champions League.

Key detail: Note Haaland’s fine v-neck tee under the ultra-crisp Dolce & Gabbana sky-blue double-breasted. The point is that, in man-style footie-star land, collared shirts are not high on the wardrobe go-tos. The boys like their team kit and their civvies to agree on that point. They’re used to stripping their field tees off in celebration of goals, after all.

For American readers it’s important to note that in European soccer, the stylistic devotion to the tee has nothing to do with Steve Jobs’ dastardly black-tee-clad role, with a mighty assist from Issey Miyake, in the almost total destruction of the collared American business shirt. Famous European ballers barely know who Steve Jobs was, much less the man-fashion templates he set out beyond Silicon Valley. For them, a tee under a business jacket or a blazer is more about limning the laissez fabulosity of the Cote d’Azur and Costa del Sol. And yes, the tee always comes off easily, so we’ll be looking for more of that as the off-season progresses beyond the European cup in Germany in June and July.

But like his beloved teammate Grealish and dozens of other athletic stars, Haaland is definitely a fan of the co-ordinated man-style play-suit, down to and including the matching sliders, minus Grealish’s worried white-sock accessorizing. It’s the unfortunate quilted fabric of this particular co-ord, not its baby-man blue, that raises a question or two about Haaland. Could it have been a fabric that Ms. Johansen somehow had dear to her heart? We think not. This particular paparazzi grab is, like those of Grealish, from June 2023 in Ibiza, and it’s unclear that Ms. Johansen was with him on that trip. From the look of things, he’s batching it with an entourage that doesn’t include her. But whether this specific play-suit is going to be trucked out this off-season isn’t the question.

The point is, European soccer has a step or two to go through the national teams’ championships in Germany in mid-summer, but the off-season has begun. And, for better and for worse, the takeaway is that there will be man-style play-suits and sliders, everywhere, as the boys rock on off-duty through Europe’s beckoning sun-kissed playgrounds.

rough summer.