Puma gives Switzerland jerseys with faulty material for Euro 2016

If you watched Switzerland’s 0-0 draw against France at Euro 2016 on this past Sunday, then you probably noticed that the Swiss had some issues with their jerseys remaining intact once they were pulled. It’s extremely rare to see ripped jerseys on the soccer pitch, but yesterday we saw multiple Swiss players on the field with ripped jerseys. It was wild to see.

As it turned out, this was due to the fact that those jerseys were actually made of “defective material,” and as a result, Puma had to apologize to the Swiss football federation.

Here’s part of the apology from the AP’s report on the story:

“This was a very unfortunate incident and Puma apologizes to the Swiss federation and their players,” the Germany-based company said in a statement. “The defective material was used in only a limited number of Swiss home jerseys.”
“There was one batch of material, where yarns had been damaged during the production process, leading to a weakening in the final garment,” the company said. “This can happen, if the combination of heat, pressure and time is not properly controlled in the manufacturing process.”

The good news is that Puma’s four other teams at the Euros (Austria, Czech Republic, Italy, and Slovakia) and Uruguay at Copa America didn’t have issues like this, so this appears to be an isolated issue as far as Switzerland was concerned. That still didn’t keep Xherdan Shaqiri from making a pretty clever quip at the expense of Puma.