(Re)thinking Saturday’s Thoughts

By: Isaiah | July 20th, 2009

On Saturday I wrote a semi-lengthy missive about a different perspective to the whole Eto’o-Ibra-Villa deal. There were a couple of responses since then that should probably be addressed, especially after having given it some thought.

I’m not sure I found holes, per se, in my argument that, to immensely simplify it, a club’s financial success could lead to the removal of a “better” player in favor of a “worse” one, but there are certainly some details that should be added on. Ramzi and Kevin both pointed out that jersey sales can be indicative of global reach/popularity. That is certainly worth mentioning, especially after I seemed to deride jersey sales as mere secondary income sources (I wasn’t deriding them, to be clear, just putting them out of the realm of primary revenue sources).

It seems to me that this is a fairly decent way of thinking about jerseys. Clubs get basically a freebie out of producing and selling these jerseys (unless they don’t sell, I suppose — does the Botiga have a backlog of Hleb jerseys?) and advertisers get a free walking billboard. No wonder jerseys are pushed so heavily. But could they also be used as a way to judge popularity not just of the particular player, but of the overall team brand?

Because they’re a product, I have to assume that jersey sales numbers are tracked about as fanatically as anything else in the modern marketplace and so I also have to assume that who buys them and, far more importantly, where is also tracked. Doubtless the more popular players are marketable across the board, meaning in all societies regardless of class or race (think Ronaldinho), and local players are more capable of “moving product” in their hometowns than in most foreign countries.* The less popular players would be more marketable in their hometowns or home countries and thus their jersey sales should reflect that.

I can’t and won’t claim to be an economist with a complete grasp of all of these concepts, but I do think it’s fairly obvious that jersey sales numbers could be used to produce a model for how well a particular team would do in a certain market. It is also true, however, that exposure and sales have effects on each other. If jersey sales are indicative of how well a team will do in a particular market, it could also be argued that TV rights can inflate those jersey sales in the future or that past shares of the TV market have already inflated those sales to the point where they are no longer indicative of what the market share will be like in the future.

Barcelona is no doubt riding high on a wave of marketability and thus can ask for a greater media payout, but I would doubt that they’re basing their financial decisions on jersey sales in any substantive way for all the reasons I outlined in the footnote. And by the way, you should read my footnotes cause sometimes they have some information in them that is relevant to the rest of the “story”.

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*It’s probably important to note that a player like Ronaldinho might not apply to this last part of the statement because he’s from a poor region where there isn’t as much money to buy luxury items such as jerseys; not only that, of course, but there are lots of knockoff jerseys being sold. When I was in Tanzania, there were no official jerseys available in Arusha except, perhaps, in the richest of the rich stores. I certainly didn’t see them and I specifically asked about them. It strikes me as incomplete to write a post about jersey sales without mentioning this secondary market and the inability of anyone to track these types of markets in general. Any discussion of this sort should be sure to provide a caveat for that and I’m sure that there are extrapolated (and theoretically inflated) numbers presented during meetings between clubs/leagues and TV groups/companies. For purposes of simplicity, I’m only thinking of these numbers in theory, rather than in actual practice (for which I’d have to have the numbers themselves, which I obviously don’t have).