Okay so, I like to think of myself as being pretty into "sexual anthropology", investigating kink and finding out where desires come from.

Thus I couldn't help but notice this, and the question has been burning my mind for months now. What's the link with WAM kink and sportswear?
I swear, when I see male content it's like 90% of the time it'll be sports stuff. I mean I get it's easy to clean but that can't be why it's SO prevalent
I don't mind, of course, but I would like to know why as a community we shovel so much of our money into the football-tshirt industry!

If your one of those guys feel free to break it down for me, I wanna see if there's a reason for the link.

- It tends to be quite close-fitting so shows off the body shape, especially when soaked in mess
- Often in bright colours and/or patterns which adds to the attraction for some people
- Some like the feel of the material when clean or messy
- Sportswear in general suggests fitness and virility. This is a wider thing beyond WAM of course, suggesting why 'athleisure' has been fashionable for decades.

From my perspective sportswear such as speedos, tri suits and wrestling singlets contain the mess incredibly well keeping it close to the skin.

I totally agree , football kit???? Don't get it!

Guilty as charged

Where I live (NYC area), there's a huge fitness culture among those in my age group, which means I see a lot of fit men and women in athleisure just walking down the street. As a straight guy, I see plenty of women wearing yoga pants, tight tops and the like, and I daydream of pieing and sliming their faces and butts in those outfits. Since I can't, I just wear those same clothes and have it done to me. They're tight to the body and the wearer is usually in great shape, which is what I aspire to as well.

I also dabble a bit in cross dressing, so while there are male equivalents (speedos, workout tanks), I tend to gravitate toward the same women's wear I see others wear. I think my body looks better in those clothes anyway.

Finally, a lot of times these clothes are made by upscale brands who sell them at high price points. There's just something about walking into like, a Lululemon, talking to an employee about a new item I'm thinking about buying, and knowing that maybe I might do some yoga in it, but no, lady, I'm going to wreck it with pies and slime.

I own a couple of football (soccer) shirts too, and for me, not only is there the tight fit aspect, but there's also a revenge angle: if I see an Arsenal shirt getting ruined, or a Man City kit getting gunged, then this Spurs fan is all for it!

I find vintage sports kit in particular incredibly hot - the look, the feel, just wearing it turns me on so much

To then get wet or messy in these clothes I find then enhances that experience tremendously

I guess that's very similar to some of the appeal of suit gunge in a sense then, cool.

Also that link of "athletic people are sexy, athletic people wear sportswear, sportswear is sexy" makes a lot of sense, especially on my UK-heavy twitter feed where we have a lot of "sports celebs"

Fully agree with the close-fitting stuff, love a good singlet so it does pain me to see so many baggy football kits that the slop just slides off!

Lotta interesting answers

On top of what others have already mentioned, which I definitely agree with, for me, it also has to do with a sense of camaraderie among those you are sharing your session with.

As my profile pics make it clear, I have a thing for mixing wam and Lycra, particularly wrestling singlets. Part of my enjoyment of wearing it has to do with taking me back to my college days on the wrestling team, when we'd all be wearing singlets during practice. While most people on the outside would think of how embarrassing it is to be wearing something that left very little to the imagination, there was a sense of bonding among the guys, that we were doing something that so few people would feel comfortable doing (ie wearing Lycra and rolling around with other men).

This directly translates to my enjoyment during wam sessions, as I love when me and my partner are in singlets, when trading pies, since it, again, allows us to bond over something that so few people would feel comfortable doing themselves (ie wearing Lycra and getting pied in the face).

You know just ran into a meetup with this talking about this subject

https://briansharpless.com/index.html

It depends if your aim is gunging the body or gunging the clothes and we have the full spectrum from naked to three piece suits on the forum.
Lightweight clothing still gives good coverage of the body inside.
Street clothes keep the body relatively clean.

Perhaps, more significantly, we are all guided by images that formed our fetish.

For me, personally, sportswear is my #1 fetish. It seems there's a lot of variety in the kink - some like tightly-fitting sportswear that really accentuates the body and others like a style that accentuates the sportswear. The latter would focus on more loose-fitting athleisure clothes like hoodies and maybe a slightly loose-fitting pair of Adidas trackies, for example. That's definitely my kink. For me, the first thing is the sportswear itself and the "body" is secondary. Not unimportant as I do appreciate a slim frame - an athletic form suits sportswear best and is generally sexy. So, the body definitely matters.

There is just something undefinably gorgeous about a carelessly draping hoodie and maybe a bit too large pair of trackies. It turns me on immediately. And nothing works better on it than a good coating of mud. Mud is the king of mess for me - other substances combined with sexy athleisure wear definitely work, but less so.

One thing that ties my fetishes together is a sense of humiliation, as tends to be common. Simply wearing sportswear in public feels sexy, because of the idea of "dressing down". It is similarly dismissing of social norms - at a far smaller scale, of course - as getting messy is. And the combination of being messy or wet in public wearing sportswear is the ultimate turn-on.

I regularly get muddy outside of winter in my sports clothes. I don't use a car, I use my e-bike to get to the best spots (often using public transport to shorten travel times before getting messy) and then ride back through the city, either or wet or kinda messy (I always get rid of the most obvious mud). That's a thrill of its own! I move pretty fast, so people won't get a long look even if I might be pretty muddy or soaked.

Away from WAM, I'm a football Secretary and trust me washing kits must play a part. If you mess a football strip for Wam or football, then a half decent washing gel (in UK Ariel or Daz) will clean in one 30c wash. Trust me when you've washed a footy kit on a Sunday post game- it's the best detergent and quickest time.

That's my 2p worth.

From my perspective:

I went to schools where rugby was played, quite often in muddy conditions. So a rugby shirt, for me, is something I'm "allowed" or even "supposed" to wear when there's a chance (hope?) of getting muddy. Then, as others have mentioned, the bright colours give a good contrast between the 'clean' and 'dirty' states, and they tend to be made of fabric that mud easily sticks to.

Tracksuits have the same effect on me, after I did a muddy assault course in one.

For me, with all the sporty / casual stuff there's also an element of "This is what the cool guys wear" (Growing up, I was very much not one of the cool guys).

I'm not so much into the branded stuff, but I did have a nice Slazenger sweatshirt once that got its fair share of muddings. If I do wear something branded I like to try and get so muddy that the logo is obscured. Feels like sticking it to the man