The Peacocks of the sea

The phrase 'supply chain issues' contains multitudes, and over the weekend the Daily Mail stepped into this morass of meaning to pull out a reason for Leeds United's new replica kits being hard to come by: the shirts fell off a boat.

The arrival of Leeds United shirts has been delayed - after shipping containers on a boat being used to bring them in from south east Asia plunged into the sea.

A morning trying to work out the veracity of this claim only taught me that the life of a sailor is dangerous, and maritime accidents happen more often than most people care to know about. Best wishes to our brave friends at sea. Are there thousands of Leeds shirts at the bottom of the ocean, though? Um, maybe? But let's assume so, because adversity means opportunity and there is a way we could dance this mess around until it becomes a positive thing for the Peacocks.

I know from the song Rock Lobster by the B-52's that the following creatures can be found on the ocean floor: dogfish, catfish, sea robin, piranha, narwhal, bikini whale. Some of these are made up but the point is that at the bottom of the sea there is a largely unexplored ecology, home to species whose habits and interests we can hardly imagine. But I can imagine they would all love football, who doesn't? The US government National Ocean Service says '91 per cent of ocean species have yet to be classified', and there is no consensus on how many there might be to name: estimates vary wildly between 10 million and 300 million. The Smithsonian tells me that even at a relatively shallow 3,000 feet there live ten billion tons of fish, and while I feel that counting population by the ton denies some of these creatures their individual agency, that's less important than the light in a marketeers eyes when you point out how many potential Premier League broadcast subscribers that is.