Mad Men and the sponsors who happily pay through the nose for a piece of Usain Bolt

13 April 2012

How much is a sportsman worth? It's a question that buzzes around the football pages when the transfer window is open, and helps us to provide a ranking system for sportsmen worldwide.

In football, transfer fees and weekly wages are a rough indicator of quality. In golf, the Ryder Cup teams are decided in part according to earnings in competitions. In cricket, players are auctioned like prize sheep to teams in the Indian Premier League. In boxing, the quality of a proposed fight is measured in the dollars it could make on pay-per-view.

In sport, money talks. And it talks particularly loudly to the gals and guys with trendy spectacles and plaid shirts who work in the advertising offices of Golden Square and Baker Street. These are the modern Mad Men, who put together the sponsorship deals that augment the best sports stars' pay packets by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds a year.

This week, Puma's Mad Men struck a multi-million dollar deal with Usain Bolt, the fastest man in history and the best and most charismatic sprinter since Michael Johnson, because he's the bloke whose face (and feet, Puma hope) will be splashed all over London and the world when the 2012 Olympics begin.

For a huge fee, Bolt will continue to wear and promote their shoes, thereby implying that Puma's natty pumps make you run faster. Despite the fairly obvious fact that Bolt could run in a pair of my sister's espadrilles and still beat any field you stuck him in, Puma are excited by this prospect, and willing to pay through the nose for it.

Bolt's new deal is worth — how much? Pick a sum. The details are under wraps but reports suggests that he will be paid on a par with Cristiano Ronaldo, whose boot deal with Nike is worth a reported £20m over four years. Bolt, then, whose financial value can't be benched against a transfer fee, can still be rated as one of the most valuable sportsmen in the world.

But what do the Mad Men get for their cash? Most of us are bewildered by the scale of elite sportsmen's incomes. How can you justify paying anyone that kind of money to wear a pair of old shoes?

I asked a few folk who work on the dark side, and know a bit about cutting the deals. They told me that the holy grail for the sports manufacturer is to team up with a sportsman who will give a brand the same sort of stardust Michael Jordan gave Nike in the 1980s/1990s and David Beckham gave adidas in the 2000s.

By aligning with a sportsman you tap into their fanbase, particularly children, who want anything and everything connected with the star they follow. Football boot sponsors sell most directly at 11 to 13-year-olds. And when a boot manufacturer hawks a new boot around the retailers, the first question they are asked is: Who's wearing it?'

You also buy time. £1m to £2m will buy you between six and 10 days of a sportsman's time throughout a year. You can have them shoot ads, meet fans, talk to journalists, or (probably) mow the chairman's lawn when he does his back in.

But if you get really lucky, your millions will buy you more than that. You buy professionalism. Beckham, for example, is closely involved in the creative direction of his adidas shoots. He picks the photographer for campaigns and has the leading voice in deciding what clothes he wears on set.

A keen, and apparently pretty good, amateur photographer himself, Beckham therefore probably delivers his money's worth — since adidas are hiring not just a mere clothes horse, but someone with a sharp creative eye.

Do other stars deliver that way? Probably not. I heard one anecdote this week about an England rugby player who went to a meeting about promoting laser eye surgery. The Mad Men were slightly surprised when the rugby player admitted that he didn't have bad eyes at all, but would willingly undergo the surgery and promote the brand if they were willing to pay up.

Some are happy to put their name to an extensive portfolio of products. Andrew Flintoff, another Puma athlete, has flogged everything from cricket bats to energy drinks and is now paid to promote the state of Dubai.

I recall interviewing Flintoff when he had a deal with Volkswagen. It took place in a car showroom in Salford and I was struck by the ease with which he dutifully and skilfully segued from straight-bat sporting questions into a eulogy on the merits of the VW Touareg — a spacious family car, he said, with plenty of room for Rachael and the kids.

But it's a tough marketplace, and brands need to make sure they know exactly what they're paying for when they shell out for top-quality talent.

Take Lewis Hamilton, who has deals with Reebok and the watch brand TAG Heuer. Both have used him in their advertising and marketing campaigns.

Reebok, who were reported in 2008 to have paid Hamilton £10m, has even created a whole virtual world around him, in which his avatar, Secret Lewis, races against time to retrieve stolen works of art.' That might strike you as quite weird. But it is also an inventive way of getting around a rather restrictive clause in Hamilton's contract.

When he makes media appearances for Reebok, Hamilton is forbidden by his deal with his team, McLaren, from discussing one fairly important thing: matters pertaining to, erm, Formula One.

Go figure, as they say.

All this money sloshes about. One assumes it doesn't all go to waste. But is it grotesque, in an age of economic austerity, to see sportsmen loaded down with millions of pounds of sponsors' money to just stand around with a branded baseball cap on?

In my opinion, no. First of all, the market has no morality. Everything has a value, and why not? Secondly, a sportsman is not a banker. Careers are short— 10-15 years in most cases — and the window for earning is limited. Bolt will not be collecting multi-million dollar shoe deals 10 years from now, and in a sport which is relatively poorly paid compared to the gaudy bonanza that is Premiership football, it's natural to milk his talent while he can.

And from a commercial point of view, brands are not stupid. They aren't in the business of lavishing millions on sportsmen who won't provide them with a return on their investment in markets across the world.

Everything has a value, and players or teams that don't offer value for money are very swiftly dumped. To wit: is it any coincidence that since Nationwide abandoned its connection with them, the England football team find themselves without a sponsor?

Dan Jones is sponsored by The Lighthouse pub in Battersea, or will be if they wipe a tenner off my tab

Mismatch made in heaven

All the rumblings around the world of boxing indicate a fight between David Haye and Audley Harrison is moving closer. Should it happen, the bout will divide critics.

Boxing purists will hate it. Haye is so evidently a superior heavyweight to Harrison that it looks like no match-up at all. But boxing purists are one reason why the sport is losing fans so rapidly to mixed martial arts.

Fans want to see big names fight. Haye and Harrison are the only British heavyweights known outside hardcore boxing circles. It makes sense for them to make the biggest British fight since Benn-Eubank. A mismatch it may be, but it's a mismatch worth making.

Testing fans' patience

Let'S be honest, England is a country climactically unsuited to cricket. We are a gloomy, rainy island where you can't trust the weather to favour men chucking a leather ball about at 90mph, even at the end of August.

How perverse that the ICC have added yet another impediment to play, by allowing umpires to shepherd players off a pitch lit by daylight and highlighted by floodlights. Yesterday's crowd at Lord's suffered sitting patiently all morning in the drizzle, only to have the players marched off for bad light after 12 overs.

It makes no sense to spectators and only serves to put people off watching live Test cricket — a form of the game, in the Twenty20 era, which needs all the friends it can get.

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