IT’S HARDLY surprising that sports marketing as we know it started in the USA. Inevitably, it was an American lawyer who got big endorsement deals launched about fifty years ago.
When Mark McCormack became the agent for Arnold Palmer in 1960, Arnold got £4,000 a year to endorse Wilson golf clubs. Deals got bigger and bigger and bigger until 40 years later Tiger Woods was hauling in £100 million a year from Nike.
Michael Jordan, the Pele of basketball, took the commodification of his fame to another level. Like Palmer, like Nicklaus and Woods, like Borg and McEnroe, Jordan was a corporate warrior.
By that time the technology of mass communications could turn a phenomenal athlete into a super-salesman, an icon almost as big as Michael Jackson, a global citizen known to people on five continents who had never watched a basketball game in their lives.
If a six foot two inch Russian blonde as photogenic as Maria Sharapova wins Wimbledon at seventeen, she will endorse Nike, Colgate-Palmolive, Motorola, Canon, TAG Huer and Honda Japan.
Today Tiger Woods, Maria Sharapova and Roger Federer inhabit a stratosphere of celebrity, wealth and power which is far beyond the wildest dreams they had when they were kids. New boy Rafael Nadal will soon be up there too. A smashing lad, Nadal got into trouble last year when he played with a huge swoosh on the back and front of his shirt.
And all that is fine because endorsements are OK for golfers, tennis players and athletes.
But do they work so well with footballers like Ronaldo, Zidane, Beckham and Henry?
The crucial difference is that football is a team game where coaches need to create a team ethic to be successful, and it is no coincidence that the three teams who are under-performing at this World Cup are those whose superstars have the biggest endorsement contracts : Brazil, France and England.
As former Real Madrid president Florentino Perez found out, it’s impossible to create a harmonious team when it contains too many superstars.In football, a successful coach needs a clear vision and total authority in his selections and substitutions, but superstars threaten that. Always have done, always will.
Of course, every story, every circumstance, is slightly different. France coach Raymond Domench admits he made pilgrimages to Madrid to persuade Zinedine Zidane, who had retired, to come back for Les Bleus. Zidane agreed to help France qualify, as long as Thuram and Makelele also came back to help him
So who is in charge? Zidane or Domenech?
Any coach, being human, has to be somewhat in awe of the wealth, the power, the sheer visibility of these icons. To drop an icon is to torpedo a myth, kill a legend, sometimes contradict a whole culture. To substitute an icon is to risk decades of abuse, as Graham Taylor found out in 1992 when he took off Gary Lineker and put on Alan Smith.
Zidane has complained about the 4-2-3-1 system that failed in the 0-0 draw against Switzerland, saying he wants another striker up there with Henry, while Domenech replied that anybody who finds himself in the penalty area is a striker.
Can Brazil’s coach Carlos Alberto Parreira drop Ronaldo when he is not performing? Or is it up to Nike, who fund the team ? If it is up to Nike, will they eventually admit that Ronaldo is a stressed-out passenger?
Football changes from game to game, of course, and today, Sunday June 18, is only day 10 of 31 day World Cup, but right now I do not expect Ronaldo and Owen to come good. Both are suffering from the intense pressure. Ronaldo felt dizzy, got taken to hospital.
Even the world’s greatest footballers can’t go from playing badly to playing brilliantly in 90 minutes.Finding form takes longer than that.
So I’ve started to wonder : if you’ve been World Player of the Year, if you’ve been European Footballer of the Year, if you’ve been on the cover of World Soccer, are you past it?
Are you already a cripple in the crucible of fame? Are you paralysed by the expectations of billions of fans whose satellite dishes suck your face into their front rooms and pubs and bars?
If you play well or badly, if you miss three sitters, you’re still there at half- time in the commercials, and after the game, and tomorrow, and next week.You might be bad in your first game, worse in your second, dropped for your third, but your face is still in all those commercials and trailers. If you fail, you fail in front of the biggest audience of all time.
The motto of Germany 2006 is “A Time to Make Friends” but with Ronaldo playing like a zombie, with Zidane sweating buckets in a feeble old French team, with Raul on the bench while Spain hammer Ukraine 4-0, with Owen being substituted in 58th minute when the score is 0-0, a more appropriate motto might have been “Make Galacticos History”.
In the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties, you could be the biggest star of one World Cup and sometimes go on to be the star of the next or the one after that. But I think that’s gone now. Nobody can be the biggest star of two World Cups.
Clearly, it’s a mega month for the marketing moguls of Nike, adidas, Reebok and other transnational companies.
And adidas will be keeping their fingers crossed that they don’t have a repeat of ’98, when their commercial featured an Englishman, an Italian, a Dutchman and a Frenchman. David Beckham was dropped by England, Allessandro Del Piero had not started for Italy, Patrick Kluivert was sent off against Belgium, and then Zidane, who was playing superbly, was given a red card for stomping on a Saudi Arabian who made an insulting remark which only an Arab would understand, although Zidane’s family are not Arabs. They are Berbers.
Just when adidas thought their luck had to improve, David Beckham was sent off against Argentina. That’s a lot of red cards for one company.
Things improved for them in a final where adidas beat Nike 3-0. Brazil did not come out to warm up, Ronaldo was on the field but did not play, and the biggest day in world sport ended in farce. France might have won anyway, but we will never know. Did Nike insist that Ronaldo played? Has that question ever been satisfactorily answered?
MAYBE SMALL will be beautiful this time. Maybe Germany 2006 will turn out to be a tournament for players from smaller clubs who parked their egos at the airport when they arrived.
Over to you, Fernando Torres of Atletico Madrid, Sulley Ali Muntari of Udinese, Asamoah Gygan of Modena, Tim Cahill of Everton, and Aaron Lennon of Tottenham,
With a few exciting games like yesterday’s Ghana-Czech Republic surprise, the corporations may yet be eclipsed by a thrilling festival of football.
Let’s hope so. Let’s hope Ghana play Brazil and we see a fabulously entertaining game. Because if this is not a great World Cup, we will never see a great World Cup again.