Kylian Mbappé had been wearing Nike boots since he was eight years old. The relationship began in 2006, when he was still a boy from Bondy, and for nearly two decades it made him the face of the Mercurial and one of the central pieces of the American brand's football strategy. This week that story is over. Mbappé has signed with On, the Swiss company associated with Roger Federer, which does not yet sell a single football boot and has chosen the France captain to enter the business. Put that way it sounds like a sponsorship change, but what has shifted is considerably deeper: the way in which a football superstar converts his name into money.
To understand it you have to start with a question football has been discussing in hushed tones for twenty years: who owns a footballer's image. From a legal standpoint the answer seems straightforward, because the image is a right belonging to the individual. But that image also has a commercial dimension that can be transferred, licensed and divided, and that is where the negotiation begins. An unknown player at a small club does not have much to divide. A star at Real Madrid has a great deal, and the real discussion is how much of that value he provides and how much the badge provides.
Real Madrid had a very clear answer for many years. With the arrival of Florentino Pérez at the start of the century, the club imposed an almost non-negotiable rule: half of each player's commercial income went to the institution, including personal sponsorships the footballer had already held before arriving. The logic was that Madrid multiplied the value of anyone who pulled on the white shirt, and therefore had the right to a share of what that value generated. Figo, Zidane and Beckham accepted that arrangement, and the club built on it one of its structural advantages: paying elite wages without the wage bill eating into its revenues, because part of the cost of its stars came back through the commercial route.
That model had few exceptions. Cristiano Ronaldo secured a more favourable split in 2009 and years later sold his image rights to an external company, leaving inside the club only what was tied to the shirt and to official sponsors. But the exception that truly breaks the model is Mbappé. His arrival at the Bernabéu almost fell apart precisely because of this: the player's camp, which in Paris had retained full control of his image and had even refused to pose with national team sponsors that did not fit his values, considered ceding half of his personal business unacceptable. The solution was to split the image in two. According to published reports, the club retains the greater part of what Mbappé generates within the Real Madrid context — shirts, campaigns by the club's sponsors and institutional exploitation — while the player keeps his personal sponsorships entirely.
That contractual detail, which at the time passed almost unnoticed, is what makes this week's news possible. Had Mbappé accepted the old fifty-fifty model, his deal with On would in part be Real Madrid's business. It is not. The decision to leave Nike, choose a brand with no history in football and accept a completely different form of payment was taken by him alone, because that part of his image belongs to him alone. The club receives the value of the Mbappé who scores goals in its shirt; the Mbappé who laces up a pair of boots and builds a brand is a separate business.
And that business has just changed its revenue model. According to The Athletic, the deal with On includes an equity stake in the company. Mbappé is not simply going to be paid a fixed sum for wearing a logo, which is how sports sponsorship has worked for decades; instead he becomes a part-owner of the business he helps to build. He will also work with the product teams on the design and testing of the boots, and the project envisages a line bearing his name. He is no longer an advertising platform, a billboard with legs for which the brand pays rent. He is a partner.
The precedent is obvious and On does not hide it. Roger Federer left Nike, gave up a classic sponsorship contract and in 2019 took a stake in On, a brand that was small at the time. He got involved in the product, gave it credibility in tennis, and when the company floated on the New York stock exchange two years later his shareholding became one of the best investments any sportsperson has ever made. No sponsorship contract would have given him anything close. On has repeated the formula with other tennis players and is now transferring it to the biggest sport in the world, with a football director, Thierry Henry, who had been working behind the scenes for months to persuade Mbappé.
So far, the comfortable reading of the story: the elite footballer is no longer an employee or an advertisement, he is a corporation deciding how to exploit his own name. This is the theory economists call the superstar effect, formulated by Sherwin Rosen more than forty years ago: when technology allows the best to reach everyone simultaneously, the best captures a disproportionate share of the market. Social media has taken that logic to the extreme. A player with hundreds of millions of followers no longer needs his club or his brand to reach the consumer, and that is why he can demand something other than a cheque.
But there is a detail that complicates that triumphant narrative. According to sources cited by CNBC, it was not Mbappé who broke with Nike but Nike who decided not to renew when the contract expired this summer, in order to redirect that money to other athletes. The brand is going through a deep restructuring, with sales under pressure and its share price suffering, and has decided that paying a very large fixed sum to an established star no longer makes sense. This is not an isolated case: Lamine Yamal, the other great figure of the generation, has also moved from Nike to Adidas. The big brands are recalculating how much it is worth renting a footballer's image, and the answer is: less than it used to be.
Seen from that angle, the deal with On stops being purely an act of emancipation and also becomes a transfer of risk. A fixed sponsorship is a salary: the brand bears the risk of whether the campaign works or not, and the player gets paid regardless. An equity stake works the other way around. If On succeeds in football, Mbappé will earn far more than Nike would ever have paid him. If the boots fail to convince, if the brand cannot break into a market dominated by Nike, Adidas and Puma, or if the stock market simply punishes the company in a bad quarter, the value of his share falls with it. Federer has lived that in both directions: the very same stake that made him enormously wealthy rises and falls with every earnings presentation.
This connects to the old argument clubs made in the battle over image rights. Real Madrid defended its half on the grounds that it was the institution that bore the risk: it paid wages even when a player was injured, built stadiums, sustained the brand over decades. The talent, they said, provided the charisma; the club provided the balance sheet. What the Mbappé case shows is that this division of roles is being reversed. The player is no longer only claiming ownership of his image; he is also beginning to assume the business risk that others used to carry. He wants to be an owner, and being an owner means being able to lose.
That is why Mbappé's signing with On is more interesting than any transfer this summer. It does not merely say that the stars have won the battle for control of their image, something his contract with Real Madrid had already made clear. It says that just as they have won it, the guaranteed money is withdrawing from the top of the market. The big brands pay less to rent, the smaller ones offer shares instead of cheques, and the footballer who wants to remain the most valuable must become an investor. For twenty years the debate was about who kept the value of a player's image. From now on, the uncomfortable question will be a different one: who pays when that value falls.
