The Sponsorship Wars — Those Who Move the Olympics and the World Cup

In the previous installments, we have followed the story surrounding the shoe itself. Detachable studs changed a final, and the waffle sole won over those who ran. But a brand’s supremacy was not decided by performance on the field alone. Which athlete, which team, which competition would wear their logo — there was another war, fought over those ‘contracts.’

The protagonist of this installment is neither a shoemaker nor a track athlete. He is Horst Dassler, the son of Adi Dassler. He is said to have redrawn the boundary between sport and business, transforming the very grand stages of the Olympics and the World Cup into mechanisms of commerce. His skill drew both praise and criticism, and shaped the prototype of the sports business that endures to this day. To speak only of his merits or only of his faults would not be fair. Here, I want to look quietly, within the bounds of publicly known fact, at how the systems he left behind changed the sport that followed.

A New Weapon Called the Contract

Horst Dassler is said to have been entrusted with adidas’s French division at a young age, where he displayed his business acumen. What he understood early on was the fact that which shoe a top athlete wore would directly sway the choices of consumers around the world. If a company’s logo was at the feet of the victor, it became an advertisement more eloquent than anything.

And so Dassler is said to have devoted his energy to building relationships with leading athletes, national teams, and the governing bodies of the sports themselves. He entertained the officials of competitions, spread a web of connections, and where necessary kept the bonds alive under titles such as ‘advisor.’ He worked his way deep into both the field of sport and the very heart of the organizations that governed it. From a stage of competing over a shoe’s performance to a stage of competing over contracts and human relationships — the center of gravity of the rivalry shifted quietly.

A Device Called ISL

Dassler’s vision did not stop at contracts with individual athletes. In 1982, he reportedly founded a company in Switzerland called ISL (International Sport and Leisure). The aim was to handle the broadcasting rights and sponsorship rights of global sporting events all at once, unifying the gateway to commercialization.

Until then, sponsorship contracts for competitions had been concluded in a relatively open manner. It was an era when many companies could engage with a competition each by their own judgment. But if the rights were organized and granted exclusively to a particular company, their value would soar. Precisely because it is scarce, people pay a higher price. ISL is said to have linked up with vast organizations such as soccer’s FIFA and the Olympics’ IOC, functioning as a device that funneled television and corporate money into sport. In the mid-1980s, the movement by the IOC to launch a global official sponsorship program also overlapped with this current. Thus sport became, at once, a pure competition and a vast business stage where the companies of each nation competed in prestige and funds.

Dassler himself passed away in 1987, but the framework of commercialization he built lived on. It should be noted that ISL would later collapse financially, and the flow of money surrounding those involved would long be the subject of scrutiny. Large payments to some officials were reportedly made, and the matter was contested in the courts as well. But that is a story that came to the surface after his death, and here I will not pass judgment on any individual beyond what has been publicly reported.

The Arrival of Ambush Marketing

Once sponsorship rights came to be sold exclusively at high prices, a new technique was born on the other side of it. Ambush marketing — that is, the ‘lying-in-wait advertisement.’

This refers to a technique in which a company that has not bought official sponsorship rights skillfully rides the fervor of a competition, giving consumers the impression that it is itself a party involved. Without directly claiming to be ‘official,’ it runs advertisements tied to the competition and prepares conspicuous arrangements around the host site. The reorganization of the sponsorship system at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics into a form of exclusivity by market is said to have provided the soil that bred such piggybacking tactics.

For the three sporting-goods companies, this battlefield was unavoidable. There were companies that secured the official seat at a high price, and there were companies that sought to slip into the gaps. Not only the quality of a shoe, but which rights to lock down, at what price, and how — that maneuvering came to govern the fate of a brand. Not on the turf of the stadium, but upon contracts and television screens, another victory and defeat was being decided.

This change also cast a question upon the very nature of sport. Commercialization brought vast funds to competitions, and there is certainly an aspect in which it supported the treatment of athletes and the development of the sport. On the other hand, concern that an arena of pure competition was being overrun by corporate logic and the maneuvering over rights was also voiced from early on. Light and shadow had coexisted within a single current from this period onward. The three companies stood at the forefront of that surge, at times receiving its benefits, and at times standing in the line of criticism.

And so, in the 1980s, sport transformed into a business of unprecedented scale. Upon the rails Dassler had laid, vast money began to run. But onto this story of commercialization, a protagonist no one had foreseen was about to appear. Neither a shoemaker nor a heavyweight of a governing body. A single young basketball player would come to rewrite the very nature of the brand from its foundations.