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Mohamed Salah's goal for Liverpool in their recent victory over Aston Villa was memorable for a number of reasons. Most notably, it was his 250th goal for the Premier League champions, while also helping the Reds end a miserable four-game losing run and put their season back on track.

On top of all of that, it was a goal scored while wearing a poppy-emblazoned shirt, as the match was Liverpool's last home game before Remembrance Day. As a result, the Royal British Legion's poppy appeal received an unexpected boost when the Egypt international's shirt sold at auction for £21,438. MatchWornShirt, the platform where one fan bought the signed shirt, has worked with the RBL for a number of years to unite the poppy kits with fans after a piece of history. All net proceeds from the sale of Salah's shirt have gone towards the charity for current and former armed forces members, and it's not the first such sale by any measure, with over £4m raised across the partnership to date.

"Our founders... reached out [to the Royal British Legion] in our early days," MatchWornShirt's James Flude explains. "At the time, we only really worked with foundations and charities in the UK anyway, and charities and foundations continue to be a huge part of what we do.

"Whenever we do a commercial deal with the club now, almost always that there will be a foundation or a charity cutback within that because we want to continue to support the partners that we work with. And for everybody's sake, for fans, for players, for us, for everything, it's great to have that."

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"I think we're quite unique in that sense that our partnerships, they don't need to be exclusively commercial or exclusively for charity. It can benefit a club and for club development, but they can also have a charitable contribution, so it can be the best for both worlds."

It's not just fans and football shirt collectors who set out to get their hands on the poppy shirts, either. While unable to share names for data protection reasons, Flude notes that one player ended up bidding for his own shirt on the platform.

"We had one occasion two years ago where a player scored a hat-trick in his shirt, found out he wasn't going to get his shirt because it was going to the Legion and so it was bidding on it via MatchWornShirt," he recalls. "So he was trying to buy his own shirt back from us. I can't say which player it was but that one always makes me smile."

MatchWornShirt only auction off first-half shirts, meaning players will always have a chance to keep their second-half shirt or swap with an opponent or hand it to a fan at full-time. Still, the uniqueness of the poppy shirts has an appeal which is borne out in the auction figures over the years.

"Anything that's got a unique differentiator is a big seller," Flude adds, noting that all kinds of one-off kits are prone to seeing a spike. "We see a lot of teams, when they play in preseason in Japan, if they do different lettering on the back for a Japanese customer, people will spend almost 50% more than they would ordinarily because of something that's unique.

"But regarding the Legion specifically, that is a huge source of pride for us as a company, and indeed a huge source of pride for football fans in the UK. So yeah, we see significantly increased average order price because people want to support the cause but also get a unique memory from it.

"It's always great to see the eventual proceeds that are generated for the Legion. And I think this year will be another good example of that."