In years gone by football boot sponsorship was the norm for footballers, guaranteeing them a healthy sum in return for the latest boots. But now it's different - some of the world's best are choosing to go unsponsored and the future of football boots is changing, so we've brought Lolade into the FourFourTwo studio to explain why!
00:00From Neymar to the Z-Ray Dewey via Lebron James, today we'll be exploring the changing landscape of football boot sponsorship and why a growing number of players are going without sponsorship altogether.
00:10In 2020, Neymar signed the deal with Puma, rumoured to have been worth £23 million.
00:16Harry Kane in 2023 signed a lifetime deal with Skechers and later in the same year Adidas made a huge splash announcing Trent Alexander-Arnold as an Adidas athlete with some bespoke Predator football boots in a game against Man City.
00:29This represents only the very top of the football boot brand's endorsement pyramid, an area that remains relatively unchanged in that the very best players in the world will still be paid very large sums of money by brands to exclusively wear football boots made by them.
00:46The question is though, what exactly has changed?
00:49Of course, not all boot deals are made equally.
00:52There are tiers to them.
00:54Exact details differ, but brands have roughly three main tiers a player I would say.
00:58Tier 1 being players who are under contract with a band, paid huge sums of money to be so and appear at the front and centre of advertising campaigns, promotions and just generally at the front of a brand.
01:11These are also the players likeliest to have extras such as signature boot lines.
01:16Naturally, these will be some of the very best and most marketable players in the game.
01:19Tier 2 players will also be household names contracted to the brand but perhaps lacking the exact level of star power as are tier 1 names.
01:27They will however also have many perks including cards that allow them to shop at brand stores and collect all the gear they might need and will always wear the very latest that the brand has to offer on the pitch.
01:37Finally, tier 3 players will receive only stock from the brand.
01:42These will often be through a rep who visits grounds multiple times a season to ensure these players are well stocked.
01:49This is, I would say, a crude tiering and there's naturally going to be some crossover particularly in the first two tiers and also sometimes in the third.
01:55But having these tiers in mind helps us really understand some of the dynamics at play and what has caused this shift.
02:03Sponsorship or endorsement deal is, of course, a contract between a business and an individual in which the business believes that paying to align with the individual will positively affect sales of its product and help with brand image.
02:17This relationship is what underpins the whole dynamic.
02:21The players in the first tier are in that tier not simply because they are the best at what they do, the partnership is more likely to result in sales for the brand.
02:29This is why at times more marketable players will receive a greater level of precedence over players with similar talents who are deemed to be less marketable.
02:38For example, Jude Bellingham has in the last few years replaced Paul Pogba as the face of the Adidas Predator line.
02:44Choosing these two as the face is not a statement from Adidas that they're the best on the brand rockstar in the model, but rather the most marketable, which is a combination of things.
02:54It's a combination of the talent which they undoubtedly have, their popularity and personality as well as other factors.
03:00And it follows that the more a brand chooses to invest in a player, the more they believe in said player's ability to generate sales for the company.
03:08This has, of course, been very difficult to quantify, not just in football, but in general life.
03:13How can Adidas really know that a player like Vinny Jr. will sell them of the Mercurial Vapor because he wears them?
03:18The answer that brands Nike in particular have come back with seems to be that there is not as much value in this regard coming from players outside of the very, very top are tier one players.
03:30And so they've decided to take a massive step back from players lower down in their pecking order, particularly those in our third tier.
03:36This rethink, along with costs and supply issues, particularly since the pandemic, have meant that the number of deals of this kind given out by brands in the tier three has reduced massively.
03:47In terms of tier two players, most notably and interestingly in terms of Nike, who have opted to allow legions of very well-known players to join other brands.
03:55In recent years, the likes of Antonio Rudiger, Jack Grealish, Raheem Sterling, Sergio Ramos, Jorginho, Christian Pulisic, Mateo Kovacic, the list goes on, have all parted ways with the biggest brand in the world and now wear boots from some other brands.
04:10Three-time Ballon d'Or winner, Etona Bomatti, has also notably left Nike in recent years.
04:14For a brand like Nike in particular, the value of names other than those at the very, very top is questionable.
04:22The brand has seemed to move to focus more on a select group of elite players to maximize the undeniable ROI they get from this group.
04:30The tier one section remaining relatively unchanged in this way in their ability to command the huge fees that Nike can offer to players of this ilk.
04:39There is, of course, then, the question of the likes of Bomatti and Neymar, who made the switch from Nike to Adidas and Puma respectively, and were undoubtedly amongst the biggest players on the roster in the women's and the men's games.
04:51At all levels, it seems, Nike are asking the question of exactly how much these talents are worth and how much they make for the company versus what it's spent on them.
05:00And the result of this question will at times be for even some of the very best to move elsewhere.
05:06Of course, the players mentioned above have made moves to different brands rather than no longer being sponsored at all.
05:12But that shift in strategy has impact on the player side too.
05:16Players earn in wages more than they ever have.
05:19And if sponsorships already only a fraction of the total income for these players become even less lucrative or less frequent,
05:26then it begs the question of whether they are even worth the restrictions that they come with for players who simply do not need the extra money.
05:33And fines are often built into these contracts for players who are seen wearing rival brands.
05:38And with that kind of lack of freedom, there's, understandably, it becomes slightly less attractive to some for anything less than the eye-watering sums we're seen paid to the likes of Neymar Kane and Alexander-Arnold by their new brands.
05:52Players are now much less concerned with playing a role in furthering the image of a corporate brand in exchange for money and more so with their own personal brands and the power that they have.
06:03And these obviously have power to make the players themselves money perhaps more than they could make by signing with a brand.
06:09Players now seek to align with brands that reflect their own values.
06:12And this may at times result in opting not to sign with a big brand at all.
06:16Hector Bellerin has fronted campaigns for Puma in the past as well as being seen wearing Mizuna football boots.
06:21He's recently become one of the players that have become an investor in eco-friendly brand Soquito.
06:26The relationship between Soquito and his investor-athletes are, I would say, the perfect representation of how players' priorities for the most part or largely have shifted towards ensuring their own values are represented with brand partnerships rather than signing with the highest bidder.
06:42Similarly, Ida Sports have launched as the first ever women-specific boot brand.
06:46Women players are significantly more prone to ACL and other serious knee injuries and also are much more likely to complain of discomfort with pairs.
06:53The latter at least being largely due to a lack of women-specific options historically.
06:58Other brands, Puma in particular, have released women's fit pairs to address this but Ida is the first to launch for women specifically.
07:06Players such as Chiara Locklear from Footlaw De La United, Sam Carey Angel of the Chicago Stars have signed on to the brand with Washington Spirits' Courtney Brown helping design the Ida Haley-up.
07:16This shift in the sponsorship landscape seems to be where changes in brand strategy and players' own preferences meet.
07:22Over the course of last season, the Zere Dewey was spotted in boots from Nike, Adidas, Sketchup and New Balance.
07:28Seemingly either shopping around for the brands he will ultimately sign for or just wearing pairs that he likes.
07:33The sheer number of releases we see these days means that players will likely take a liking to different pairs from across the market over the course of a season just like you or I might and going without a sponsor allows them to explore this.
07:46This doesn't always mean players will wear boots from different brands though.
07:49Wilfred Zahara is known to not have had a contract with Nike in recent years but can still consistently be seen wearing boots from the brand.
07:55Now simply having a choice of which pair he wears as opposed to having to wear whatever the latest Nike releases as would usually be the case in a sponsorship contract.
08:05He's known to have, for example, a particular liking of the Nike GS360 model so is simply able to wear these as he pleases.
08:13Daniel Munoz in particular recently has also turned head in an array of retro Mercurial Vapor boots.
08:19A level of personal choice that's simply not possible for somebody under contract.
08:23In a recent interview, LeBron James responded to a common myth that he chose to sign with Nike simply because Michael Jordan had.
08:30He remarked that a large reason he went with the brand was on thinking about what he'd generally wear day to day and these were Nike products.
08:38I think he mentioned Air Force Ones for example.
08:41For him to sign with Nike meant that his personal choice wasn't majorly affected by signing.
08:46Of course though, an athlete of that size is never likely to go without a deal given the amount they can make.
08:52This area is one that's likely to continue to move in a direction previously unseen.
08:56As brands seem to pull away from a large section of players, so too do players seem to want to move in their own direction.
09:03What has not happened to this point is for this change in landscape to have a noticeable impact on what we see on pitch.
09:09But if things continue to evolve as they have been, that may happen sooner rather than later.
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