On 18 September the Swiss sportswear brand On announced its entry into football with Kylian Mbappé. With that, Mbappé’s relationship with Nike, some twenty years long, came to an end. His line in the announcement sounded less like a footballer than like a strategy deck: football doesn’t need another sportswear brand doing more of the same.
It was the calendar, not the sentence, that stayed with me. Twenty years. A memory stretching from a child’s first pair of boots to a World Cup, woven out of commercials, shop windows, shirt sales and billions of impressions. Who paid for that memory? Nike. Who holds it today? Mbappé.
What Nike is left with is an archive.
It sounds harsh, because we are used to a different calculation. A contract with a famous face goes into the budget as an advertising cost, and the value it creates is assumed to be added to brand equity. In reality, a large share of that value is credited not to the brand but to the face. Over those years the consumer learns two things: this product is good, and this man wears it. When the contract ends, the second fact stays exactly where it is; it just changes address. A famous face is not a brand’s capital. It is its invoice. As long as it is paid, it works for you; the day the payments stop, it starts working for someone else, and it does so with the recognition you paid to build.
Jenni Romaniuk, in her work on distinctive brand assets, weighs an asset on two axes. The first is how many people recognise it. The second is how exclusively those people link it to you. Famous faces have no rival on the first axis. On the second they usually fail. The same face smiles for a watch brand, for a bank, for a phone; and when the contract ends, for a competitor. This is the asset with the highest recognition and the lowest ownership. A board that understands this cannot present the money it spends on it as an investment.
A face opens doors, that much is true. When you enter a new category, borrowed trust is far faster than trust built from scratch; that is exactly what On is doing today. Rent is not a bad thing. What is bad is mistaking the rent for ownership, because what you think you own, you never insure. Under Armour trying to retell its story after parting ways with Stephen Curry is a current example of how quickly an uninsured property burns.
The way to do the opposite, ironically, sits in Nike’s own history. In 1984 it signed a young basketball player, and thirteen years later it turned that contract into a separate brand division. Michael Jordan left the court more than twenty years ago; the Jumpman silhouette still sells. The difference is that Nike did not merely rent that face. It built pieces of its own around it: a silhouette, a product line, a name. Things that stay put even when the face moves on.
On seems to know this too. Roger Federer has been not just a face at the company since 2019, but a partner. In Mbappé’s case, press reports say part of the payment was made in shares; the company has not disclosed this. If true, the logic of the move is clear: turn the face from a tenant into one of the landlords, which is to say, make leaving expensive.
When you rent a face, you are not buying attention. You are buying an expiry date.
That is why there is one question every celebrity partnership should face, and its answer is rarely in the deck: when the contract ends, what will we have left? A colour, a gesture, a sound, a product name: something that reminds people of you even while the face is smiling in someone else’s ad. If the answer is “nothing”, this is not a brand investment but an expensive media buy. Price it that way, report it that way, and do not be surprised the day it ends.
Mbappé now smiles next to a different logo. What Nike has left are the photographs of twenty years it paid for.