![]() ![]() ![]() Nike was annoyed to discover that the ace goal-kicker Rob Andrew preferred boots made by Mizuno. They try to keep that quiet, although news of it leaked when Nike objected to the fact that almost half of the England rugby team appeared in a variety of footwear against Canada at Twickenham recently. It is not just that clashes occur when a player is sponsored by one firm and his team by another. They are ready to challenge Adidas, which has done deals with Germany, France, Spain, Argentina, Yugoslavia, Romania, Sweden, Hungary, Morocco and China.īut at a cost. They have also bought up a series of individual players, including a pounds 10m contract with the Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler. To that they have added the national squads of Italy, Holland, Nigeria and Korea. Then, earlier this year, Nike signed the biggest sponsorship deal in the history of marketing - a pounds 200m package with the Brazilian national football squad. First they signed an eight-year sponsorship deal with the US Soccer Federation worth pounds 74m - a small investment, its analysts reckon, against the time when football takes off in America. But the company's strategists have recently decided that this is the great hole in the sportswear market. Until recently football remained outside the Nike sphere of influence. Behind the big three is a pack of smaller companies such as Pony, Puma and Mizuno, and Britain's Umbro, which has stitched up the English football kit scene. Under the chairmanship of Saatchi's former chairman Robert Louis Dreyfus, it has almost totally revamped its product range, adopted a more aggressive marketing strategy and overtaken the industry's third big player, Reebok, which was the market leader in the 1980s but which now spends a mere $400m a year on sponsorship. Adidas trails behind with pounds 2bn, but it has recovered from the losses incurred earlier this decade when it was owned by the disgraced French politician Bernard Tapie, who bought it from Dassler's widow. Nike now spends pounds 5.6bn on marketing alone and commands about 35 per cent of the massive global market. ![]() Today both have moved beyond running shoes into a whole range of sportswear. A local graphic designer was paid $35 to come up with the Nike "swoosh". The name Nike - the Greek goddess of victory - came to one of Knight's partners in a dream. More than 30 years later, Bill Bowerman, a track coach at the University of Oregon, and Phil Knight, a college runner, founded a similar business in America. The distinctive Adidas brand mark of three white stripes was developed in those days as a way of bolstering the shoes' sides. In 1936, the black athlete Jesse Owens disproved Hitler's Aryan theories at the Berlin Olympics when he won four Olympic gold medals wearing their shoes. It is all along way from the small shop lit only by a paraffin lamp in which in the 1920s Adi Dassler and his brother Rudolf, two sports-mad cobblers, began in Herzogenaurach, not far from Nuremberg, to make shoes for track and field athletes and footballers. Shane Warne, the Australian bowler, wears a Nike ear-ring. Michael Johnson wore gold trainers with a massive Nike tick when he won his Olympic gold medals in the 200 metres and 400 metres. Andre Agassi, who wore a Nike baseball cap throughout his Wimbledon triumph, is paid about $2m a year. ![]() Michael Jordan, the legendary point guard for the Chicago Bulls basketball team, is reputed to earn $10m a year from his Nike deal. Nike pays out huge sums to major sporting superstars such as Tiger Woods, Pete Sampras and Eric Cantona. It is not hard to see where a lot of that margin goes. ![]()
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