UK teacher splashes £20k to amass official shirt from every FIFA team

London - A maths teacher has become the best-dressed man in football after he splashed out 20,000 pounds on a collection of 300 official football shirts.

Nick Warrick set himself the challenge of owning shirts from all 208 national teams in the world after joking about it in the pub.

Over the last two years he has amassed 186 by haggling, swapping and buying and is now just 22 strips away from his goal.

The dedicated 26-year-old also has more than 100 shirts from his beloved club Peterborough United, and his collection is so big he has had to move it back to his parents’ house.

The collector revealed that he was struggling to complete his challenge because many of the 22 countries left were locked in conflict.

Among the shirts the super fan still needs are those of Syria, Yemen and Libya, the Congo and Eritrea, in Africa, and Turkmenistan, which borders Iran.

Despite his enviable collection, the Peterborough United fan admits his favourite shirt is still his team’s blue and white strip.

“I was having a chat with a mate in the pub one day and wondered how possible it would be to collect them all. And after a session on Ebay I already had 50,” the Daily Mail quoted him as saying.

“I started keeping a tally of how much all the shirts are costing me, but stopped when it got to such a ridiculous amount.

“The good thing is that the shirts will keep their value and some have increased in value,” he said.

Warrick, who lives with his girlfriend Nina, 28, in Hampton Vale, Cambridgeshire, and is a maths teacher at Thomas Dekin Academy, Peterborough, started his challenge in March 2010.

He has set himself tough criteria, insisting that none of the shirts can be replicas like those available in UK shops.

All the strips must have been part of the country’s official kit-bag at some point, although they do not have to have been worn during a game.

He has even been forced to learn bits of Samoan and Russian along the way as he has bagged shirts from countries many people haven’t even heard of.

Among his most prized trophies is a shirt from Saontome and Principe, a tiny island in the Gulf of Guinea, along the Atlantic coast of West Africa, which cost him 250 pounds.