Is a football player worth 80 million pounds sterling? Apparently yes, since Real Madrid, the Spanish football club, have offered this staggering sum for Cristiano Ronaldo, the 24-year-old Portuguese player. Even Ronaldo describes the record-breaking 80 million as “quite a sum of money”. Why his current club, Manchester United, should be willing to sell him for that price is not hard to imagine. Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager may have once said about Real Madrid that “he wouldn’t sell them a virus” but as the Chinese saying goes: Never name the well from which you will not drink. When Real Madrid faxed an offer of £80 million, Ferguson did not hesitate to accept. The sum was way more than Ronaldo was worth to him.
So if he is worth it? Is any player worth that much money? For a start, that is just the transfer fee or the amount Manchester United get for selling him. Ronaldo himself does not get a penny of the transfer fee. But fear not, his personal terms are pretty staggering too. He is expected to earn £9.5 million a year in his first year or £183,000 a week. Pretty good for kicking a ball on a pitch.
There is something obscene about the money in sports now and not just in football. The highest earning sport star is the golfer Tiger Woods who gets more than a $100 million a year in endorsements alone. They key word is star. It is not strictly about talent or even sport, though of course, that helps, but about creating a brand. Tiger Woods is an immensely successful brand.
In football, David Beckam is the big brand. Rather ironically, he was in London on the day the Ronaldo transfer deal was announced, launching the latest poster in his advertising campaign for a brand of underwear. That’s the thing. Whereas once footballers and other sportsmen made money endorsing products linked to their sport, such as football jerseys or tennis rackets, now it is anything from underwear to motor oil. Ronaldo endorses Castrol Oil, the engine oil. What has that product got to do with football? The answer is “winning performance”, that is the message that Castrol are aiming to associate with their product by using Ronaldo as their “ambassador”.
The endorsements work. They earn more than the sport itself. A footballer is now first and foremost a vehicle for selling merchandise. Beckam may say he feels slightly embarrassed when he sees the giant posters of himself wearing nothing but his underwear but the ads pay off. Men buy them. Women by them for their husbands. Sales of the brand have risen by 150 percent since Beckam endorsed them.
David Becham is a talented football player. But he is also good-looking and glamorous. Had he been just talented but unattractive, he would not be earning the endorsements he now commands. This is the case not just in football but in all sports. What sponsors are looking for is a persona to attach to their brand. Being talented and winning matters, but what matters more is being photogenic and appealing. This was brought home to me in a discussion with a tennis talent scout. When looking at juniors to sign up, what excites him is far less the quality of the player’s game as the player’s overall aspect, particularly for female players. “If a young tennis player can play passable tennis but is good-looking, she is a potential gold mine and all of us will fight over her.
If she plays great tennis but is ugly, you can forget it. She could win Wimbledon but she wouldn’t make as much money for us as someone who only makes it to the quarterfinals but is pretty.”
Will Ronaldo succeed in emulating Beckam’s marketing success? On the football field yes. But that is not where Real expect to recoup their money. What they are hoping is that he will be catapulted from the star footballer he already is — he has already won the World Footballer of the Year title — to the global brand he could become, and they will reap the benefits in the form of his player image rights. Football may be a sport to its fans but it is a business to those who run it.
