Soccer in Sun and Shadow

Walking Advertisements

In the mid-1950s, Peñarol signed the first contract for shirt ads. Ten players took the field with a company name displayed on their chests. Obdulio Varela, however, stuck with his old shirt. He explained: “They used to drag us blacks around by rings in our noses. Those days are gone.”

Today, every soccer player is an advertisement in motion.

In 1989 Carlos Menem played a friendly match wearing the shirt of the Argentine national team, along with Maradona and the rest. On television it was hard to tell if he was the president of Argentina or Renault, whose enormous logo was featured on his chest.

In the ’94 World Cup the logos of Adidas or Umbro were more visible on players’ shirts than any national symbol. The Mercedes-Benz star shines alongside the federal eagle on Germany’s training uniform. That same star lights up the clothing of the club VfB Stuttgart. Bayern Munich, by contrast, prefers Opel cars. The packaging firm Tetra Pak sponsors Eintracht Frankfurt. Borussia Dortmund’s players promote Continentale insurance, and Borussia Mönchengladbach’s flog Diebels beer. The teams named for Bayer in Leverkusen and Uerdingen advertise the company’s drugs talcid and larylin on their shirts.

The advertising on a player’s chest is more important than the number on his back. In 1993 the Argentine club Racing, having no sponsor, published a desperate ad in the daily Clarín: “Wanted: Sponsor…” Advertising also outweighs the clean living the sport is supposed to promote. That same year, 1993, while fights in the stands in Chile reached such alarming proportions that the sale of alcohol during matches was banned, most of Chile’s first-division teams were promoting beer or pisco on their shirts.

Speaking of clean living, a few years have gone by since the Pope performed a miracle and turned the Holy Spirit into a bank. Now the Italian club Lazio has it for a sponsor: “Banco di Santo Spirito,” proclaim their shirts, as if each player were one of God’s tellers.

At the end of the second quarter of 1992, the Italian company Motta took stock of its accounts. Its logo, worn proudly on the chests of Club Milan’s players, had been seen 2,250 times in newspaper photos and featured for six hours on television. Motta paid Milan $4.5 million, but its sales of cakes and other treats increased by $15 million over that period. Another Italian firm, Parmalat, which sells dairy products in forty countries, had a golden year in 1993. Its team, Parma, won the European Cup Winners’ Cup for the first time, and in South America three teams that sport its logo on their shirts, Palmeiras, Boca, and Peñarol, won championships. Clambering over eighteen competitors, Parmalat took the Brazilian market by storm and gained a foothold among consumers in Argentina and Uruguay — all with a helping hand from soccer. What’s more, along the way Parmalat bought several South American teams, thus acquiring not only shirts but legs. For ten million dollars, the company bought Edílson, Mazinho, Edmundo, Kléber, and Zinho, all of whom played or once played for the Brazilian national team, as well as the other seven players at the club Palmeiras. Anyone interested in acquiring them should write to the company’s head office in Parma, Italy.

Ever since television started showing players up close, the entire uniform, from head to toe, has turned into a billboard. When a star takes his time tying his shoes, it’s not slow fingers but pocketbook smarts: he is showing off the Adidas, Nike, or Reebok logo. Even back in the ’36 Olympics organized by Hitler, the winning athletes featured Adidas’s three stripes on their shoes. In the 1990 World Cup final between Germany and Argentina, Adidas’s stripes were everywhere, including the ball and every strip of clothing worn by the players, the referee, and the linesmen. Two English journalists, Simson and Jennings, reported that only the referee’s whistle didn’t belong to Adidas.