"He's worth it in shirt sales alone" - is it a myth?

[roxy]

I may be wrong but I don’t think any football club sells more than about 3m shirts either per year.

You’re right. http://www.sportbible.com/football/...st-selling-football-shirts-worldwide-20170210

So it’s a myth. Might pay his wages for a week or 2.

 

[KS55]

Not to mention that the kit manufacturer already payed the club. Pretty sure the club makes very little from shirt sales.
Now, if you were to be able to negotiate a new lucrative deal with a manufacturer based on you buying certain players..........

The usual arrangement is:
Manufacturer pays the club an agreed amount as a lump sum every season.
Manufacturer takes all the profit from the shirt sales until the profit is equal to the lump sum
After that profits are shared on a basis agreed at the outset.
Thus, the bigger the lump sum, the more shirts have to be sold before the club gets any further income.

 

[Skip Donoghue]

This is the thing with this total myth
Surely if Nike, Adidas, Puma whoever makes the shirts, when they hand over 10s of £millions of pounds to a club for the pleasure of manufacturing the shirts and being associated with said club, the only ones making any money from shirt sales is the sportswear company, the clubs get the cash, Puma or whoever then coin it in from sales to cover the outlay

 

[mccity]

The shirt sales bit is definitely an exaggeration, but the idea that a player is worth paying a bit more money for because they are more marketable does have some basis.

 

[Mad Eyed Screamer]

The Inspiral Carpets sold more t shirts than records..... Cool as fuck.....

 

[I'm With Stupid]

This is the thing with this total myth
Surely if Nike, Adidas, Puma whoever makes the shirts, when they hand over 10s of £millions of pounds to a club for the pleasure of manufacturing the shirts and being associated with said club, the only ones making any money from shirt sales is the sportswear company, the clubs get the cash, Puma or whoever then coin it in from sales to cover the outlay

I would argue that the sportswear company more often than not aren't making money from shirt sales either. Big sportwear companies make money from having their brand associated with top sports people, which makes them money across their whole range of products, not the specifically branded stuff. Tiger Woods signed a $150m deal with Nike. I hardly think he's selling $150m of his TW hats. But what he is giving them is more than $150m of publicity when he appears on the back pages of the newspapers and on every sports report in the world.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

The shirt sales bit is definitely an exaggeration, but the idea that a player is worth paying a bit more money for because they are more marketable does have some basis.

Absolutely. And it may also depend on how much of the player's image rights are signed over to the club as part of their contract. I believe City insist on players doing this, but that's based on some half-remembered video from quite a few years ago, so it could be bollocks.

But yeah, if you can get Cristiano Ronaldo to appear in the advert for your official office supplies partner for Asia, you can probably charge them more.

 

[aguero93:20]

I had a quick scout around but can't find anything meaningful on this and hoped somebody might be able to help by pointing me in the direction of articles etc. Then I realised it could be worth a short thread to discuss.

Essentially the issue is do shirt sales pay, for example, a 'superstar' player's wages?
I have a united supporting b-in-law who used the phrase about Ibrahimovic (sp) but for the first time I thought about it literally and wasn't convinced. It's come up since a few times with other players and some people seem convinced.

Put simply - if a player was on say, £200k / wk and profits from each shirt with his name on are £50 then it would take 4000 shirts/wk to pay his wages, right?

Well, no. The main issue is how many of those shirts would have been sold anyway? In the case of Ibra, United would have to pick up 4000 or so new shirt sales every week for years, probably from Sweden, maybe the Balkans, and possibly a few elsewhere. Supposing a player is at a club for three years, that's 624,000 shirts sold extra to cover three years - I'm not sure how realistic that is even allowing for annual kit changes. Maybe I just can't see it from the right angle - I'm a marketing person's nightmare as I don't believe anything so find it hard to think there are enough people wasting money like that.

I realise I've simplified the scenario, is too simplistic? (I deliberately stuck to wages, not transfer fees). Am I missing some subtlety?

Also, you may want to check my maths...

They're worth it, but only if they don't bring down performance standards and even then it's a long term investment with short term returns as you don't get paid for it until you sign your next round of kit and sponsor deals and on average they're ten years and a long term player barely reaches that these days. Not worth basing your transfer system on.

 

[urban genie]

Think a high profile player attracts more sponsor rather than helps sell more shirts

 

[keith's curle]

The Inspiral Carpets sold more t shirts than records..... Cool as fuck.....

I remember reading in Q about 20 or 30 years ago about why so many bands were reforming for tours, and it was basically to sell merchandise. T-shirts and God knows what was worth far more than ticket sales, back catalogue sales and all the rest. I know the industry has changed enormously since then (especially online and social media), but I doubt this basic premise has changed. Cool? Maybe. Weird? Definitely!