Recreation and Sports

Why Having Big Name Professional Athletes to Endorse You is Big Business for Companies

Not all professional athletes make a lot of money such as those that participate in less traditional non revenue producing sports. In order to be able to be a professional athlete full time, many of these less popular athletes have to rely on the products and money they get from their sponsors and advertisers. Other athletes, that are constantly in the press however, make a lot of money playing their sport and even more sometimes from their sponsorship deals. One of the first athletes to really do this was NBA player, Michael Jordan who used his basketball skills to promote several products in addition to apparel, toys, items and even basketball videos with his likeness on them.

Wherever there is space to promote a sponsor, they will find a way to do it whether it is on the helmet of a race car driver or in the form of a temporary tattoo for professional beach volleyball players like Gabrielle Reece. Athletes are offered great package deals to promote a certain brand as a kind of spokesperson and in exchange they receive monetary and product compensation. For the less famous athletes, this is extremely helpful to offer them the needed income to be able to train full time. For other highly compensated athletes in sports as professional baseball, basketball and football players it is just icing on the cake.

Michael Jordan was one of the first professional athletes to start this trend and he ended up bringing in more from those sponsors than he did from shooting hoops. The inital companies saw the complete star power in Michael Jordan and knew he could make their product be noticed with him promoting it. One example was Gatorade which was a sports drink that had existed for some time but when they got Michael Jordan to endorse Gatorade, sales rose quickly and it became the best selling sports drink.

Now younger professional athletes that are coming into the game see product endorsements as part of the package deal when they sign professionally. Many new athletes that are confident in themselves and their ability to represent a product even hold out for multi million dollars contracts today. One example of that younger big time player is Le Bron James. He made it into the headlines for his basketball abilities and noted to be the next Jordan when he was just a sophomore playing in Akron, Ohio. Now he is one the biggest paid athletes with several lucrative endorsements.

The biggest grossing professional athlete to receive the largest amount of endorsement deals ever is PGA professional, Tiger Woods. As an individual athlete, he is only paid by performance and how many big golf tournaments he wins. Because he has been such a high profile, successful and marketable player, his endorsements deals are earning him several million every year in addition to his golf earnings. He also has lost several of these sponsors with the recent scandals of his several infidelities.