This Philadelphia man collected over 100 bootleg sports T-shirts. Now he’s showing them off as art.

Longtime Philadelphia sportswriter and sports fan Dan McQuade isn’t a big jersey wearer. But when he sees an interesting T-shirt outside the stadium ahead of an Eagles game — you know, the ones being sold from shopping carts or backpacks — he buys it.

Over the years, McQuade amassed a collection of more than 100 unofficial T-shirts. And, on Thursday, he’s putting on a one-night-only art exhibition to show them off.

“I’m a bit of a pack rat, so I’d save stuff,” McQuade said. “When [the Eagles] won the Super Bowl in 2018 is when I started buying a lot more than I had in the past. And then at some point before last year, I was like, ‘Oh, it’d be fun to display these all somewhere.’”

Some parking lot T-shirts are designed as exact copies of stadium merchandise, but McQuade said he’s more interested in shirts with unique designs. For McQuade, collecting those shirts has become a journalistic endeavor.

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Official retailers are beholden to trademark restrictions, and must present a licensed image of the team. The bootleg T-shirts in the parking lot, on the other hand, can capture a different side of the fan base, focusing more on fan interests as opposed to corporate.

“Teams want you to cheer for them the way that they want you to cheer for them,” McQuade said. ”They want to control what the fan culture should be, and so I am fascinated by the people who try to go outside that, even if they’re just guys that do it to try to make a buck. They do, even if accidentally, create what I think is like art almost.”

One of the most popular recent T-shirt slogans is “It’s a Philly Thing,” which McQuade said he didn’t personally like and was surprised caught on. But the T-shirts captured a specific moment in time — the Eagles’ Super Bowl run last year — that resonated with fans.

Since bootleggers have to print physical T-shirts to sell, instead of selling them online, they have to find slogans or images that resonate with fans in order to make money. According to McQuade, this helps them more authentically capture the fan experience because they’re able to live in the moment.

McQuade said one of his personal favorites in the collection is a T-shirt celebrating former Eagles quarterback Bobby Hoying because of how it represents a bootlegger’s ability to capture a precise slice of fandom.

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“[Hoying] had one game against the Bengals where the Eagles came back to win, 44-42,” McQuade said, referring to a 1997 game that represented Hoying’s third career start. “People were convinced that like, ‘Oh, we have we finally have the quarterback. This guy’s great. We did it.’ And so I have a shirt that has Bobby Hoying, No. 7 on the front.” The back of the shirt referred to the next game.

“You can trace that to this specific game that this would have been sold outside of, because people were excited about Bobby Hoying. ... This was such a small blip in time. There was only that one morning when this shirt was sold and people were excited. And then when they got killed in this game, people were like, ‘Oh, maybe this guy isn’t going to be the quarterback of the future for the team.’”

To put together the exhibit, McQuade partnered with the City Pigeons Podcast, which opened an event space called The Coop last summer in Spring Garden. They have hosted watch parties for Phillies playoff games and other events, and McQuade, who met the hosts through X and had been a guest on the podcast previously, approached them about hosting the event a few months ago.

Jesse Rendell, one of the hosts, said they were immediately on board with McQuade’s idea. Rendell, the son of former Pennsylvania governor and Philly mayor Ed Rendell, said he wasn’t as prolific a collector as McQuade, but that part of the reason he loved the idea was because of the universality. Everyone who’s been to a game on Broad Street has seen the bootleggers selling shirts — and he even had a foray into bootlegging himself.

“This friend of mine, during the year they went to the Super Bowl that they won, he came up with the idea because Nick Foles and Darren Sproles were on the team to do ‘Foles to Sproles Super Bowls,’” Rendell said. “It was so stupid, but I convinced my dad that we should bankroll the shirts, and my buddy gets these shirts printed without any real idea of what to do with them, because he wasn’t a bootlegger by any stretch of the imagination, and he didn’t really know how to sell them. I believe he at one point tried to sell in the parking lot and got a bunch taken from him, but it was just such a random foray into the world of bootleg T-shirts that was backed by Ed Rendell.”

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McQuade and his co-hosts pushed the event up a week after the Eagles’ free fall put their chances at the bye week in jeopardy, wanting to ensure it happened before the end of the Eagles’ season.

“This is the best thing going on in Philadelphia sports this week,” Rendell said.

Since anyone can be a bootlegger, the shirts are generally poor quality, so McQuade stopped wearing them when he decided to put together an exhibit. Still, some of the shirts on display have holes in them or faded and chipped-off prints. Most of the collection comes from parking lots and gas stations near the South Philly sports complex, but he also sourced from a few local vintage shops to diversify.

McQuade’s collection dates back to the 1980s, and many of his shirts from the ‘80s and ‘90s have held up better than his more recent shirts. But the poor quality is what makes the shirts so funny — and so special.

“There is something that really hits me about a really poorly made T-shirt,” McQuade said. “I have one from 2018, when everyone was doing the Eagles underdog thing that, I have some that say ‘Beware of the underdog’ but I also have one that says ‘Be aware of the underdog’ and it’s like, ‘Oh, you messed up the phrases,’ but to me that’s just as funny if not funnier than a shirt that is officially licensed.”

The exhibit, being held at 1025 Hamilton St., is a free event on Thursday from 7-10 p.m., and the City Pigeons crew will be hosting a live podcast recording on site.