Hey
I just did a search for some phrases I found on one of their product pages and I wrapped up this long query in double quotes.
"Large graffiti print on front that illustrates the club's famous players and history. The traditional blue jersey has gold details including team badge, adidas logo and sponsor design"
the results that are returned shows the worldsoccershop.com result first & second and therefore they seem to be an authority on this product description.
I have a client that is setting up a store to take on some rather big boys like notonthehighstreet.com and in this industry where they have several, established competitors for each product the big authority stores seem to rank for the generic product descriptions with no real issues.
This is ultimately difficult for the smaller stores as whilst they have less resources, pages on my clients site that use these duplicate descriptions are just getting filtered out of the results. We can see this filtering in action with very specific searches like the one above where we get the 'we have filtered out similar results' message in the search results and low and behold, my clients results are in those that are filtered.
So, to answer your original question:
They have not 'coded' anything in a specific way and there is nothing you are missing as such. They are just an authority site and as such are 'getting away with it' - which, for the smaller players, kind of sucks. That said, only the worldofsoccer pages are returned so the other sites could well be filtered out.
Still, as I am coaching our client, see this not as a problem but as an opportunity. By creating unique content, we can hopefully piggy back other more authoritative sites that are all returning an exact same product description and whilst I don't expect us to get 1st place, we can work towards first page and out of that filter.
Duplicate content is a massive problem and on this site we are working on there is one product description that copyscape tells us is on 300 other sites. Google wants to return rich result sets, some shops, some information, some pictures etc and not just 10 sets of the same thing so dare to be different and give them a reason to display your page.
Hope it helps
Marcus