Why The US National Team Earns Twice As Much As Argentina ⚽️
Plus Budweiser strikes back, An American will drive in F1 and Ronaldo and Messi playing chess
Welcome to Athletic Interest.
Did you know that the United States has one of the biggest kit deals in Nike history?
According to some reports, they earn more than double the yearly fee given to footballing giants Argentina.
Here is the current top 10:
🇩🇪 - €56 million (Adidas)
🇫🇷 - €42.5 million (Nike)
🏴 - €42 million (Nike)
🇪🇸 - €40 million (Adidas)
🇧🇷 - €37 million (Nike)
🇮🇹 - €35 million (Adidas)
🇺🇸 - €32 million (Nike)
🇦🇷 - €14 million (Adidas)
🇳🇱 - €6.5 million (Nike)
🇧🇪 - €6 million (Adidas)
For context, Switzerland, the team that sits just above the U.S. Men’s team at 15th in the FIFA ranking, earns just €1.5 million per year from kit sponsor Puma.
If on-field performance has little to no relevance for the size of this deal, the question remains, why is Nike giving so much money to the U.S. Federation?
Well, there are three main reasons.
The U.S. is full of people with money who love sports.
The popularity of football is growing in the U.S.
The U.S. Women’s team is the best in the world and Women’s football is growing.
Our first point is that the U.S. market, home to over 300 million people, is simply too big for Nike to ignore.
While only 30% of these people are actually interested in football, compared to almost 70% of Europeans, that still creates a market of almost 100 million potential customers.
The only problem is that U.S. football culture is far less defined than it is in the rest of the world. Many American fans are new and have a far more casual relationship with the beautiful game. In fact, if you look closer, only 7% of the U.S. population consider themselves to be ‘avid fans’ in Germany it’s over 30%.
It is likely that Nike’s sponsorship of France, England, and Brazil sells more shirts right now than the U.S. national team.
But Nike will not have based its decision solely on shirt sales for this World Cup, if anything it is placing a bet on the future of football in the U.S.
The U.S. is set to welcome the next World Cup in 2026, and FIFA president Gianni Infantino claims that football will be the country’s biggest sport by then.
This is the same Infantino that recently said that he feels like a gay, disabled woman so perhaps we should treat his words with a little caution.
And yet, football is steadily gaining a foothold in American life.
This World Cup is set to draw its biggest U.S. audience in history, with today’s fixture against England tipped to break the record for the most-watched football match in U.S. history.
The men’s team isn’t the only area of U.S. football that is growing.
Nike is also kit supplier to the US women’s national team as a part of the deal.
The Women’s team has been top of the FIFA rankings for a long time and has some of the most marketable female stars on the planet.
While women’s football is still far off the men’s game in terms of commercial appeal, the sport’s fanbase has grown a lot in recent years and overall income is projected to triple by 2030.
In 2019, the USWNT even set a record for the most sales of any U.S. national team jersey.
While football may never replace Basketball or American football, if the current growth continues on the same trajectory, Nike may be grateful that they locked the U.S. into a 15-year deal.
🍎 Sports Business Bites
📺 Nike is not the only company looking to cash in on football’s growing popularity in the U.S.
Running a 30s ad during a World Cup game on Fox costs $300k. This figure jumps to $700k per 30 seconds for ads shown during today’s game between the U.S. and England.
The broadcaster is doing its best to recoup the $1 billion it paid for the World Cup rights of 2018 and 2022. For the 2018 edition, the broadcaster generated about $384 million. With the U.S. having qualified for this tournament and viewing figures expected to break records, Fox can expect to make back the rest of its investment.
🍺 One company that won’t be profiting from the World Cup is Budweiser.
Under Qatari law, Alcohol is illegal in public spaces, but the authorities were set to make an exception for fans going to the World Cup. FIFA then announced, days before the first game got underway, that the Qatari Royal Family was rescinding the promise.
This left Budweiser, FIFA’s official beer provider, with thousands of cans that they were unable to sell. Luckily, their marketing department had a genius idea.
Instead of simply selling the beer in other markets, Budweiser will gift the entire stock to the winning country of the World Cup.
According to some reports, this could be the equivalent of €75 million of beer. Although it’s not clear if the entire stock would be sent or just the beer seen in the original photo by Budweiser.
🏎 While the USMNT is busy fighting it out on the biggest stage of football, a U.S. driver has just been invited onto the biggest stage in motorsport.
Logan Sargeant, a 21-year-old from Florida, will compete with Williams next season having been promoted from Formula 2 to replace outgoing Canadian driver Nicholas Latifi.
With 2023 also welcoming the first Las Vegas GP, F1 bosses will hope that the appearance of an American on the grid (for the first time since 2015) will help solidify the support of the millions of new American F1 fans and catapult the series to new levels of popularity.
♟ Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo just teamed up…to play chess!
The long-time rivals were snapped playing a tense game together in an advert for Louis Vuitton. While the image quickly broke the internet, some chess nerds spotted something odd about the chess pieces…
They have been arranged in the exact same positions as seen during a game between chess rivals (and No1 and No2 in the world) Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura from 2017.
More interestingly, the match in question actually ended in a draw.
Perhaps this is Louis Vuitton’s way of not picking sides in the age-old debate of Messi vs Ronaldo.