Avery Dennison supplied the NFC tag sewn into Willem II’s 130th anniversary jersey, a detail that appears nowhere in the club’s own launch material or in any of the kit coverage. The Tilburg side switched on its Tricolores+ digital platform on 12 August 2026, the club’s actual birthday, and told supporters they could reach it by holding a phone against a tag in the shirt. The supplier only became public when Avery Dennison said so itself, on LinkedIn.
Willem II’s own account is straightforward enough. The tag sits on the underside of the anniversary home shirt, a Meyba design that went to pre-order on 1 July and carries no commercial branding on the front or back. Tapping it opens Tricolores+, where supporters sign in with a Willem II account to reach squad and behind-the-scenes content. The club says access will widen over time to season ticket holders, club card holders and WII Kings members.
Every shirt, not a limited edition
The scale is the part worth noting. Avery Dennison describes the tag as going into all jerseys for the season rather than a commemorative run, which puts a chip in ordinary retail stock rather than in a few hundred collector pieces. That is a different proposition from the NFC work most clubs have done so far, where the tag was the reason for the special edition. Here it is standard fit, and the company frames the result as turning shirts into multi-season engagement channels rather than a one-off campaign.
The supplier layer nobody names
Willem II does not name a technology partner. Avery Dennison’s own newsroom has not carried a Willem II item either, so the announcement exists only as a social post. That is normal for garment embellishment, where the heat transfer, the crest and the labelling come from a supplier the shirt buyer never hears of. It is also the layer that matters to anyone tracking where NFC in apparel is actually going, because the tag, the encoding and the tap experience are all supplier decisions.
What is actually in the shirt
This is NFC, not UHF RAIN RFID, and the distinction is not academic. An NFC tag works at 13.56 MHz in the HF band, follows ISO/IEC 14443 and the NFC Forum tag types, and is read at a few centimetres by a phone that supplies the power. It carries no battery. The tap works because the tag holds an NDEF record with a URL, so the phone opens the Tricolores+ landing page without any app installed, on iOS or Android. Each tag also carries a unique identifier, which is what lets a club tie a tap back to an individual garment rather than to a generic campaign link. Garment inlays for this job have to survive washing, ironing and the flex of a jersey in play, which is why they are laminated into the embellishment rather than clipped in as a hard tag.
NFC jerseys are moving down the league table
Avery Dennison has been building this programme for a while. It ran what it calls the world’s first NFC-enabled season jersey with Trabzonspor, with the tag in the club crest and the tap unlocking signings, player messages and polls. It worked with Canterbury on the British and Irish Lions’ first connected rugby jersey, with the chip at the bottom of the shirt feeding a Lions Clubhouse platform. It made NFC badges for New York Jets shirts around the London game. It holds licensing deals with the Premier League and Major League Soccer, where it supplies names, numbers and sleeve logos across all 30 MLS clubs through its Embelex embellishment portfolio.
Every one of those is a flagship. Willem II is a club that came back up into the Eredivisie this season and is playing for survival in it. The story is not that another football shirt has a chip in it, it is that connected apparel has stopped being a marquee project for global brands and turned into a line item on a mid-sized club’s kit order. For the club, the return is first-party data: who tapped, what they looked at and when, tied to a shirt rather than to a cookie. For anyone selling NFC into apparel, it is the more useful signal of the two.
Read more at https://www.averydennison.com/na/en/industries/apparel/solutions/consumer-fan-engagement
