Mega brands are the real superpowers of the sporting world, so surely it’s only a matter of time before they buy into Europe’s top leagues
For the last month some slickly edited highlights have been floating around on YouTube of an English academy team playing Barcelona’s juniors at La Masia. The Barça kids start well, romping about like handsome schoolboys, hitting the post a few times and generally caressing the ball as though it’s the last golden ostrich egg left on earth. Gradually, though, the visitors start to get a grip. After half an hour they score from the penalty spot. And by the end of a feisty second half the team in white have, to their own obvious delight, beaten Barcelona 3-0 on their own ground.
Great news, then, for the next generation, the massed coaching structures of (presumably) Arsenal, Spurs, Manchester City, Liverpool, whoever. Or, as it turns out in this case, Nike. Yes, that Nike. Victory at Barcelona’s training ground represents the outstanding result so far for the Nike Academy, a full‑time Premier League‑grade coaching school funded and administered by Nike, Inc and based at the FA’s own lost idyll at St George’s Park.
Nike FC have so far been an uncharacteristically quiet success. Headed up by a group of ex-pro coaches with a revolving squad of unsigned under-20s, the academy has to date helped 44 young players into professional contracts without quite conjuring the A-list break-out star the company clearly craves. Abdul Majeed Waris, ex-Nike, went to the World Cup last year with Ghana. Tom Rogic has played for Celtic. Only this month the Nike midfielder Callum Harris joined Wolves.
Never mind the sense of a kind of human product placement, this is all very intriguing and an excellent thing for the players involved. Nike has clout and pizzazz and endless resources. It doesn’t have a first team to clog with ready-made filler or a manager to sack. Here, surely, nurture and refinement is all.
As you can probably tell I’m guessing here, because despite my requests to come and have a look the academy has remained off limits to the Guardian due to everybody being too busy all the time. Nike, a company that has no other purpose beyond garnering publicity to promote its plimsolls, has pulled down the veil. And to be fair you can hardly blame it. Image is everything when it comes to retailing interchangeable sporting goods and the prospect of some chippy back-page hack poking his nose in is probably a bit off-message with the billions spent on minutely controlled, relentlessly upbeat brand management.
Which is a shame as Nike’s academy is perhaps the most interesting football thing it’s ever done. Let’s face it, brands such as these are essentially parasitic. It’s quite funny really: here we have an unavoidable global presence, a farrago of noise and light, a thing that really does appear to be a thing. But which still basically has no content. As with the global fizzy drink model the product itself is close to an irrelevance, almost invisible behind the brilliantly fabricated glare, the lifestyle hoopla, the vast aspirational pretence.
Now and then companies such as Nike may suggest its shoes or shirts have some improbable air-bubble nylon mesh superpower. But the truth is almost embarrassingly plain. None of it makes any difference. Swoosh as much as you want. Present us with endlessly seductive packaging. The fact is nobody plays sport any better because of a company’s kit. The entire gaudily coloured edifice is a lie, albeit a nicely turned out one.
Plus Nike still seems a slightly odd fit with football, with its air of West Coast gosh gee whizz, the vague sense of uplift and can-do that is pretty much all they’re really selling you with that gossamer nylon T-shirt. I suppose Adidas can at least style itself as a central European school of science, having invented the screw-in stud and then helped pioneer the modern, lighter boot. But Nike’s first really notable step into elite football was signing up Ian Rush in 1982. Beyond that it was the sponsorship of the Brazil national team that really made Nike in football, although mixing yourself up with Fifa’s exiled Lord of the Flies Ricardo Teixeira is never a particularly good look.And yet for all that the Nike Academy really does look like an excellent idea. Sure, it’s a marketing device. To some even theBarcelona victory will look a little soft (Barça are a “Nike club” too after all). But this is still exciting stuff. It’s about development and participation, not to mention a sense of some other power in play outside the interlocking interest of the clubs.
Plus of course, this is surely a glimpse of the future in some form. Mega brands are the real superpowers of the sporting world. Nike has an annual turnover greater than the combined total revenues of every football club in the top five leagues in Europe. It has more money, more power, more clout than almost any other body you’d care to name.
As such you have to wonder how long it’s going to be before corporations such as these begin to buy into the Premier League for reasons of positioning, power play and image laundering: Manchester City without the sovereign state imperialism. Right now Aston Villa FC are for sale for as little as £100m. Never mind an academy up the road, why not buy a club and run it as a benevolent, transparent, elite-level nursery? Make another La Masia, flood the first team with home-schooled talent, do it all properly.
Certainly, if you were to invent professional football from scratch now you’d find fewer teams called things like “Leicester” or “Manchester” and more called Nike or Reebok or Mercedes. After all, why get bogged down in something as arbitrary and circumscribed as geography when there’s a real-life, living breathing mega brand to pin your hopes on. No doubt in reality this process will carry on in more diffuse fashion. But it is still fun to speculate. Who knows, 20 years from now when Sergio Busquets’s Nike FC are duking it out with Frank Lampard’s Manchester City for the Euro League title that 3-0 win in Catalonia may even start to look like the first
glimmer of something more profound.
(Source: The Guardian)
