The Super Bowl Loser 49ers Still Win in, Say, Chad

Nothing highlights the thrill of victory like tugging on a T-shirt proclaiming your status as Super Bowl champion—or the agony of defeat, if you’re the losing team now holding pre-printed championship merchandise. While the San Francisco 49ers wound up on the wrong end of Sunday’s game, losing to the Baltimore Ravens, the winner will be World Vision, a nonprofit relief organization that will receive more than 100,000 articles of clothing from the National Football League to donate to underdeveloped countries.

NFL rules state that all gear proclaiming the losing squad as Super Bowl victors, including T-shirts, sweatshirts, and ball caps, cannot be sold. For the first 30 Super Bowls, it had to be destroyed after the final whistle. In the 1990s, however, the NFL was approached by World Vision, an evangelical organization with a presence in more than 100 countries, which wanted to take the apparel to places where the outcome of an American football game was less important than keeping warm. So for the past 17 years, the loser’s championship gear has been shipped off to areas World Vision deems to be in greatest need. After Super Bowl XLIV in 2010, children in earthquake-ravaged Haiti donned shirts celebrating the defeated Indianapolis Colts; in 2007, items celebrating the (not) champion Chicago Bears went to Romania and Chad.