Key Takeaways:
–The old playbook is dead: Nike’s decline signals the end of brands that built empires on mass cultural moments and shared experiences
–Fragmentation is the new foundation: today’s sports audiences exist across infinite platforms and touchpoints—and that’s an opportunity, not a crisis
–Orchestration beats domination: the competitive advantage now belongs to organizations that can create relevant content at scale across distributed networks, not those trying to recreate singular blockbuster moments
Nike just lost the Premier League ball deal.
Liverpool—one of their flagship clubs—is jumping ship to Adidas. Portugal ended a 27-year partnership despite Cristiano Ronaldo practically being born in Nike boots. Even Harry Kane defected to Sketchers. Sketchers!
For a generation of football fans, this feels like watching Germany lose 1-7 to Brazil. Or Mike Tyson getting dropped by a YouTuber. Or… you get the point.
But in the context of this article, Nike’s decline—while a story currently being covered by the most prestigious business sections—is about the death of something much bigger than one brand. And if you work in sports media, you live it every day.
The Old Marketing Model: Built for Only One Audience
Let’s go back to 2000 for a second. Nike drops an ad where football legends battle through a sci-fi fortress to steal a ball. Every football fan on the planet watches it. Everyone talks about it. Everyone remembers it.
Same screen. Same story. Same collective, “holy shit, that was cool.”
Nike built their empire on these shared moments. Ronaldo at the airport. Joga Bonito. Write the Future. Each campaign became the center of the conversation for the entire football world.
This was marketing when culture had a center. Wen everyone gathered in the same town hall.
Then the Town Hall Burned Down
Fast forward to today, and that same cultural moment fractures into a dozen different experiences:
-Some fans catch it on TikTok, chopped into 15-second clips
-Others see it through creator reaction streams
-A few watch it during live Twitter discussions
-The analytics crowd breaks it down on YouTube
-Gen Z discovers it through a meme three weeks later
-Your uncle still thinks it aired on TV (but it didn’t!)
The audience that once gathered in one place now exists everywhere and nowhere at once. Read into it what you will, but one thing’s for sure: this is the obituary for the old playbook.
Why Nike’s “Problem” Is Your Opportunity
This video by Plaantik, Nike is Struggling with Football. Here’s Why, breaks down everything mentioned above beautifully. It’s a worthwhile 11-minute watch for anyone interested in the cross-section of sports and brand, business and fan behavior.
The main thing the video gets right is how Nike built an empire designed for monoculture. Mass moments. Shared experiences. The assumption that everyone would see the same thing at the same time.
But here’s what we took from it: that this empire was always going to fall. And its collapse creates the biggest opportunity for anyone who understands how to build in the new world.
The truth is, fragmentation is just specificity at scale. In other words, brands should stop treating their scattered audiences across countless platforms as obstacles, and start realizing they are all addresses. And that every single one represents a fan who wants to be spoken to directly, in their language, on their terms. That’s why, in such a climate, achieving business-driving domination is no longer a matter of “prominence” but of “orchestration.”
The New Game Has New Rules
In 2025, the brands and sports organizations that thrive are the ones that moved on from mourning the fall of the town hall and evolved into building infrastructure to show up in every room.
They’re not asking, “How do we create one massive moment?” They’re asking, “How do we create a thousand relevant moments simultaneously?”
They’re not wondering, “How do we get everyone to see our content?” They’re wondering, “How do we make sure the right people see the right version of our content?”
In a world where your audience is scattered across countless touchpoints, the competitive advantage turns from “reach” to “relevance.” And relevance doesn’t scale through louder megaphones. It scales through smarter infrastructure.
What This Actually Looks Like
Let’s get specific. In the “old days” of 10 years ago, you created one Write the Future ad and blasted it everywhere. In the new world, you create the foundation for a thousand Write the Future micro-moments:
-A 60-second hero film for YouTube
-Multiple 15-second TikTok versions with trending audio
-A Twitter-optimized gif for real-time engagement
-A breakdown video for tactic nerds
-Behind-the-scenes content for the creator economy
-Localized versions for different markets
-Player-specific cuts for individual fanbases
-Data-driven variants based on viewing behavior
Same creative vision. Infinite expressions. Some may label it “fragmentation—and they’d be right. And it’s hard work creating dozens or hundreds of “moments”, but there’s no reason to complain. Today’s technology is designed to orchestrate the distribution of content to the right person, through the right channel, at the right time.
The Video You Need to Watch
Again, watch the video above that sparked this whole reflection. Give it a moment. But watch it as more than a retrospective of Nike’s decline. Read between the lines and you’ll see it’s a preview of what’s coming for every sports organization that hasn’t figured out how to thrive in the age of distributed attention.
The Funeral is Actually a Birthday Party
Nike’s decline symbolizes a transition: The age of cultural monopolies is over. And that’s fantastic news for everyone who’s been building for what comes next. Because the question isn’t whether your audience is fragmented. It is. The question is whether you’re built to meet them where they are—not where you wish they were.
And if you’re not? Well, there’s always Sketchers.