Printing & Customization
Three families of process put most of the decoration you see on football shirts, and almost every practical difference between them comes down to a single question: does the colour end up inside the fibre, or on top of it? Answer that and the rest — how the shirt feels, which fabrics work, what can go wrong — mostly follows.
Dye sublimation turns dye into a gas that enters the polyester fibre itself, so the colour becomes part of the fabric. Screen printing pushes ink through a stencil directly onto the garment and cures it there, leaving a thin layer on top. Heat transfer makes the design on a separate carrier first and then bonds it to the shirt with heat and pressure.
Those three are the families, and the last one has members. Heat-transfer vinyl and DTF are both heat transfer: they differ in how the transfer itself is produced. HTV cuts the design out of coloured film; DTF inkjet-prints it onto film and coats it with adhesive. Treating DTF as a fourth thing alongside heat transfer is a common mistake, and it obscures the fact that the two share a bonding step and most of their behaviour on the garment.
So one family dyes the fibre, one prints directly onto it, and one attaches a layer made elsewhere. That difference explains most of what follows.
Sublimation is a phase change: a solid turning directly into a gas without passing through a liquid. The printing process is named after it because that is literally what happens to the dye.
The design is first printed with special disperse dyes, usually onto transfer paper. The paper is placed against the fabric and both go under a heat press. The heat does two things at once. It turns the dye from solid to gas, and it warms the polyester past its glass transition — the temperature at which the polymer chains loosen from a rigid state into a mobile one. The gas diffuses into that softened polymer, and as the fabric cools the chains tighten again with the dye trapped inside.
The result is not a layer. There is nothing sitting on the fabric to lift off, because the colour is in the fibre, which is why a sublimated area feels no different from the cloth around it and why it does not make the fabric stiffer.
This is also why sublimation only works properly on polyester. Cotton is cellulose rather than a thermoplastic polymer: it has no glass transition to soften through and nothing for a disperse dye to bond with, so the dye has nowhere to go and washes out. On a polyester-cotton blend the effect is proportional to the polyester content, and the result is paler than on 100% polyester.
There is a second constraint that follows from the same mechanism. Sublimation adds dye; it cannot remove or cover what is already there. On a dark shirt the existing colour shows through, which is why sublimated designs are produced on white or light base fabric — and why a sublimated shirt is usually printed before it is made up rather than decorated afterwards.
Screen printing is the oldest method here and the most mechanical. A fine mesh screen is coated with a light-sensitive emulsion and exposed so that the emulsion hardens everywhere except where the design is. Washing out the unhardened emulsion leaves a stencil: open mesh where ink should pass, blocked mesh where it should not.
The screen is laid on the garment and ink is pulled across it with a squeegee, forcing ink through the open areas onto the fabric. The garment then passes through a dryer to cure the ink, which is what fixes it rather than leaving it merely dry.
Each colour needs its own screen and its own pass, which is the structural fact about screen printing: the setup work scales with the number of colours and not at all with the number of garments. A vendor guide we reviewed suggests screen printing becomes the economical choice above roughly a hundred pieces — their estimate, not a verified break-even, and it will depend on the shop.
Because the cured ink is a layer on the surface, a screen print can be felt. A light print on a loose knit is barely noticeable; a large, heavy, solid print is a panel of material that air does not pass through the way it passes through the fabric around it.
Heat transfer is a category rather than a single technique. What unites everything in it is the sequence: the design is produced on a carrier — a film or a sheet — away from the garment, and is then bonded to the fabric in a heat press. The garment itself is never printed on. Only the finished design is moved onto it.
Two methods dominate on football shirts, and the difference between them is entirely in how the carrier is made. One cuts the design out of coloured film. The other prints it onto clear film with an inkjet. Both then press and peel.
Heat-transfer vinyl, or HTV, is the cutting route. It starts as a sheet of coloured film with a heat-activated adhesive on one side and a carrier sheet on the other. A plotter cuts the design out of the film, the surrounding material is weeded away by hand, and what is left is pressed onto the garment under heat and pressure. The adhesive melts, bonds to the fabric, and the carrier sheet is peeled off.
This is the method behind most name-and-number work on football shirts, and the reason is practical: a number is a shape rather than an image, each shirt is different, and HTV involves no per-design setup. Cutting one name costs essentially the same per shirt as cutting a hundred.
The limits follow from it being cut film. Each colour is a separate layer of vinyl, so multi-colour designs are built up by layering — which adds thickness. Fine detail is limited by what can be cut and then weeded without tearing. And because it is a solid sheet sitting on the fabric, a large vinyl area is noticeably less permeable than the cloth it covers.
Direct-to-film is the other route to a transfer, and it is the newest process here. It is not a separate category from heat transfer: it is a way of producing heat-transfer media by inkjet rather than by cutting. A 2026 review of the technology in the Journal of the Imaging Society of Japan frames it exactly that way — as digital printing applied to heat transfer, in which an inkjet press manufactures the transfer that a heat press then applies.
The design is printed in full colour onto a PET film. For a dark garment a layer of white ink is printed over the colours on the film — which, once the film is flipped face-down onto the shirt, ends up underneath them, opaquely masking the garment colour. That inversion is why DTF works on dark fabric where sublimation cannot.
While the ink is still wet, hot-melt adhesive powder is dusted over it and sticks to the printed areas only. Excess is shaken off, and the film is cured — in an oven, or under a press held deliberately open above it — so the powder melts into a continuous adhesive layer bonded to the back of the ink without transferring anything yet. The finished transfer can be stored and pressed later.
Applying it is a heat press. One manufacturer's published application guide for its own film specifies pre-pressing the garment for a few seconds to flatten it and drive off moisture, pressing the transfer for ten to twenty seconds, letting it cool completely, peeling the film cold, and then re-pressing the finished design — a step it recommends specifically for wash and rub fastness. Different films and inks carry different numbers; the shape of the process is consistent.
Because the adhesive is a powder melted in place, how evenly it is applied and how thoroughly it is cured are part of the result rather than incidental to it. The journal review identifies powder scattering as the process's main practical problem, to the point that its authors describe developing a powderless method that lays the adhesive down by inkjet instead. A supplier source separately notes that powder particle size affects the thickness and evenness of the adhesive layer, and that uneven curing can leave a print stiff or prone to cracking later.
The result is a layer on the surface, like vinyl — but a printed layer rather than a cut one, so photographic images, gradients and unlimited colours are possible without cutting or weeding anything.
The fabric is not a neutral surface. It decides what is possible, and in the case of sublimation it decides whether the method works at all.
What the fabric underneath is actually doing, and why two shirts with the same composition label can behave differently:
It is worth restating the distinction on its own, because it predicts most of the practical differences without anyone needing to make a performance claim.
None of this makes one method best. They are suited to different jobs: an all-over pattern, a club crest, a squad number and a photographic graphic are four different problems, and a shop choosing between methods is choosing for the job in front of it.
Printed-decoration durability is widely quoted and almost never substantiated. The honest position is that the printing method is one input among several, and the others vary too much for a general figure to mean anything.
You will see confident durability claims attached to every method here. Those are overwhelmingly vendor claims rather than test results, and they tend to be qualitative — one guide we reviewed rates sublimation "excellent" and screen printing "good" without reference to any standard or measurement. Treat them as what they are.
It is worth noting that the more technical manufacturer documentation is often the more careful. Kodak's own application guide for its transfer film ends by stating that its figures come from the company's laboratory tests and experience, that results may vary according to different conditions, and that judging whether the product suits a particular use is the user's responsibility. That is a manufacturer declining to make the guarantee that marketing pages hand out freely.
What can be said without inventing anything is structural. A dye that sits inside the fibre has no surface layer to lift, so peeling is not one of its failure modes. Surface layers can crack or lift, and heavy ones are more exposed to that than light ones. Neither statement is a guarantee about any particular shirt, and anyone offering you a wash count is offering you a marketing number.
The single biggest thing within your control is how the shirt is washed and dried:
Sublimation turns dye into a gas that enters the polyester fibre, so the colour is part of the fabric and adds no surface layer. Screen printing pushes ink through a stencil onto the surface and cures it there, leaving a thin layer that can be felt.
Not durably. Cotton is cellulose, with no thermoplastic structure for the dye gas to enter and nothing for a disperse dye to bond to, so the colour washes out. Workarounds exist — a polyester coating, or a blend — but on a blend the result is proportional to the polyester content and lighter than on full polyester.
Because sublimation adds dye to the fibre and cannot cover what is already there. A design sublimated onto a dark fabric would be overwhelmed by the existing colour, so the base is white or light.
Heat-transfer vinyl is the common choice, because every shirt carries a different name and number and vinyl has no per-design setup cost. That is a general observation about the trade and not a statement about any particular supplier's process.
It is a type of heat transfer. Both DTF and heat-transfer vinyl produce a design on a carrier film and bond it to the garment in a heat press; they differ only in how that carrier is made, by inkjet printing in one case and by cutting coloured film in the other. Listing DTF as an alternative to heat transfer is a common error.
They do different things, within the same family. DTF is a printed layer, so it handles full-colour and photographic artwork without cutting or weeding. Vinyl is cut film, which suits solid shapes such as letters and numbers. For a two-colour squad number, vinyl is the straightforward answer; for a detailed graphic, it is not.
There is no honest universal answer. Execution, fabric, print size, placement, washing and use all affect the outcome at least as much as the method does, and the durability figures circulating online are vendor claims rather than test results.
A large solid surface print does, because a continuous layer of ink, vinyl or adhesive covers the gaps in the knit that air would pass through. A small print has a negligible effect, and sublimation adds no layer at all.
Most writing about garment printing is published by companies selling garment printing. The mechanisms described above are consistent across sources and match the underlying chemistry; the performance, durability and cost claims that usually accompany them are not independently tested, and are identified as vendor claims wherever this article refers to them.
One disclosure. The journal review of DTF cited below is published in a peer journal, but its author is affiliated to Matsui Shikiso Chemical Co., Ltd., a manufacturer of inks and supplies for the process, and the paper introduces that company's own products alongside its technical account. We have used it for how DTF is classified and for the powder-scattering problem it identifies. It is not independent research and we are not presenting it as such.
Educational and technical sources:
Manufacturer and supplier comparisons, useful on mechanism and unverified on performance:
FootVerse is an India-focused online retailer of football jerseys and sportswear. We publish The Football Journal to explain how things work, including the parts of the trade where the easily available answer is a sales pitch.
This article describes printing methods in general. It does not describe our own production process, and nothing in it should be read as a specification of what any FootVerse order will use.