The latest episodes aired by Netflix of “The Last Dance” address the finances of Michael Jordan, where, the also his performances were exceptional.
And besides, he did all this by refusing partnerships at $100 million for two hours of appearance! Michael Jordan is now the richest sportsman in history, with a personal fortune estimated at $2.1 billion (1.9 billion euros) in 2020 by Forbes magazine.
The Last Dance traces in episode 5 the beginning of this success story, and in particular the cornerstone: the contract with Nike launching the Air Jordan, still a social phenomenon thirty years later.
Surprisingly enough, Michel Jordan only swore by Adidas and didn’t even want to meet with representatives of Nike, the small brand that was rising at the time in the shadow of Converse, the NBA’s official equipment manufacturer. And it was young Michael’s mom who forced him to move to Oregon. “My mother said to me, ‘You’re going to go, and you’re going to listen to them. You may not like it, but you’ll listen to them,’ Jordan says in The Last Dance, where Nike has pulled the family rope as he greets the prodigy with a banner reading “The Nike family warmly greets the Jordan family.” “I find myself in this meeting where I didn’t want to be. Nike makes his presentation and my dad says to me: You’d be a fool not to accept this deal, it’s the best you could have.” To sign the young prodigy, Nike line up twice as much as for any star of the time, for a contract at 500,000 dollars a year. Expensive for the swoosh brand, but the return on investment was immediate: Nike hoped to sell for 3 million Air Jordan in the first year. They sold 126 million! Since then Jordan has not left Nike, a partnership from which he has withdrawn $1.3 billion since 1984, according to Forbes.
$1.7 billion in partnership
The Last Dance also chronicles jordan’s $1.7 billion commercial partnerships, according to Forbes). But for Jordan, not all of these partnerships are the result of his charisma or personality. “It was the performance, my stats that signed these partnerships. Believe me, if I had made two rebounds and three assists per game, no one would have signed me!”
