UP551 Coke's Cole Palmer Problem: When the ambassador misses the party

0:00For a top layer, it will run from three to maybe seven, eight million a year. And this is rarely a one year deal. So we'll be you're talking about two years at least. So it starts at 10 million.

0:14Ricardo Fort:Hi, welcome to Unofficial Partner. It's Richard Gillis here. That was Ricardo Fort, former global head of sport at Coca-Cola. Talking to him today because the Cole Palmer question, let's call it that. in April, Coca-Cola announced its newest football brand ambassador fronting Premier League and World Cup activations. A month later, less than a month later, Thomas Tuchel, the England manager, left him out of the England squad. He's not going to the World Cup. Cue Schadenfreude and a useful way in to a bigger conversation. Hiring a footballer for your World Cup campaign is an exercise in managed risk.

0:49Ricardo Fort:They might not get picked, they might get injured or like Vinicius Junior, they might sponsor virtually everything else so your multi-million dollar idea ends up as just one more logo on a formula one type jumpsuit ricardo now advises brands on this sort of stuff talks about how these brands actually get built where the leverage sits in the negotiation and why most of the money is already spent by the time the squad sheet drops plus we talk about cultural relevance everyone's favorite world cup cliche ticketing should fifa do it does it have any impact is the FIFA brand bulletproof and the speech a sponsor should never give all in the next 40 minutes or so I want to talk about Cole Parfer but purely just as a way in to talk about endorsements and what that means now in relation to major events in the World Cup and so it's about the World Cup, but really I want to get into the sort of rabbit hole of what endorsements are now and how it works.

1:56Ricardo Fort:And there's no one better to talk about it than you. So I'm going to read this. This is the 22nd of April, 2026. Cole Palmer signs as Coca-Cola's football brand ambassador. This is Coca-Cola's own press release. The multi-year partnership will see dynamic ice call player Palmer, front Coca-Cola and PowerAid activations across the Premier League and FIFA world cup 2026 so the coca-cola company welcomes england and chelsea star cole palmer as its newest brand ambassador in a partnership that brings together one of the most exciting young talents with one of the world's most iconic brands now that's a month ago it's a long time in in football he's not been selected for the england team quite controversially in some people's view and what now so the good the point you were making well let's just frame your initial response to this because you can see that where the conversation will go initially is there's a bit of well what happens what's it like in the office the day the team gets announced that sort of detail let's get into that bit first your emotional response and then we can talk about strategy stuff?

3:06Well, I think that in general, every brand that signs a player that is likely to play at the World Cup months before the World Cup expects the player to be playing. So frustration, of course, but I think that in most of these companies that understand how sports work, and Coca-Cola is one of them, there is no pointing fingers anywhere because this can happen. It's not the first time that they pick players and actually for this workup is not the first time that they pick a player that is not going to the workup I think Rodrigo got injured he's also a power raid ambassador and there's always a frustration but at the end of the day that's football so there's

3:50Ricardo Fort:risk obviously and as you say history is littered with injured players who didn't get there how do you mitigate against that so when you're looking at a contract what does it really mean let's talk about it we'll talk about the campaigns that maybe have been done already and are in the can and so there's a sort of that bit of the wastage but what do you when you sit down and say right okay i'm in charge of coke's marketing budget globally i want cole palmer and but what does what gets inserted into those contracts? So if you're doing the contract well, you're having discussions about the possibilities of what happens when he wins a lot or she wins a lot or something goes wrong.

4:38So you have triggers for if you are the player of the tournament, if you are the top scorer of the season, or if you got injured and you don't play for a long period of time or if you're not called up for the workup. So all of that are things that a good contract should consider. He said that it's not an easy conversation because to go to a famous player that expects to be playing and tell him, so what if? It is a very difficult conversation. And a lot of brands don't do it because it's so obvious that he or she will go to the workup that many of them avoid the conversation. And then they find themselves in a situation that they didn't expect to be.

5:19So that's interesting.

5:20Ricardo Fort:So avoiding that which talks to a sort of where the power lies in a conversation like that, because my assumption would be it would be on the brand side, on the Coke side, on the big multinational conglomerate who have all the money. but what we're saying really is that the player has enormous power at that moment there is a moment running into a major tournament where the player and the agent is leveraging that moment and so landing the idea that Cole Palmer couldn't might not get selected when you're having the conversation in March April this year how does that just talk me through that because that means that actually there's a lever there that Coke are going to have to overpay for this or they're going to have to then extend into this conversation a way they don't want to yeah there's enormous power on the side of the player if you're doing this late a lot of these contracts they happen a year or more before the big events and you have to take into account that some of the players are not being hired just for the workup now it's a bummer that they're not going but i mean if you're getting a player that is playing for a top league like the premier league or la liga you're going to be with them for a long time.

6:33So it's not a contract for a few months. So there are a lot of benefits for the contract, but the workup is a problem. But the players have a lot of leverage. And the reason why they have a lot of leverage is because the way it happens is usually the decision to hire a player comes after a creative idea has been developed by an advertising agency. So there's an idea that works for that player and you cannot replace the player and everybody loves the idea and you want to do that film and you start budgeting the film and you start working towards getting the film done and the film depends on that player so when you go to talk to the an agent i mean you basically you pay whatever they demand so it's a it is a difficult conversation because if you're doing late if you're doing just for that event then you are i don't think that's the case for coke but in general agents have a lot of leverage so we'll move off cole palmer in a minute but they're just because he's just quite a useful proxy for this because you've got two things happening at the

7:36Ricardo Fort:same time you've got that the commercial negotiation what's it worth how much am i going to pay for this piece of talent now at this moment so that's the question and And you've also got the sort of knowledge on the agent side that pre-work has been done. So you're sort of going into a negotiation. I can see a difference between the Cole Palmer, the Premier League campaign, but Cole Palmer, the World Cup campaign. So let's just sort of work through that, because obviously in the release, and it's interesting it was released only in April. But to your point, I don't know how far we go back, a year when they're thinking about Cole Palmer, when he was really hot this time last year and he was the sort of player, standout player.

8:24Ricardo Fort:So we then get through that process. So let's talk about the cost. There's the cost of the deal. What would you put that at? What would you guess that number to be? for a top layer um it'll run from three to maybe seven eight million a year and this is rarely a one-year deal so it'll be you're talking about two years at least so it starts at 10 million yeah okay and then the additional the act what we might call the activation cost that is now sort of lost i mean i can see a scenario where a clever agency will say no hang on let's save that film we can cut it in a different way we can make a clever sort of use of this but essentially what's the cost of that activation around an individual player well it really depends for the brand and how much money they're putting behind it that how how much they rely on that specific player so it can be 50 60 million if you're running a global campaign but the thing richard is that a lot of the work by the time the coach selects the players is already done.

9:36So the film has been launched, the advertising is running, the posters at the point of sale, the supermarkets have already been placed. So the waste is not as high as most people would think because a lot of the benefits that they are accruing from the campaign is already in their books. And it's just odd. It's like a Panini album when you get the Brazil national team without Neymar and Neymar is called. So it's the opposite problem. So it's just a wrong forecast. But the albums have been sold. The stickers have been sold. So, yeah, it's not ideal.

10:15Ricardo Fort:So it's a slow process. Quite often in the marketing press, they talk about agility and move fast, fail fast, all of these great ideas. But really, we're talking about a slow-moving sort of engineering operation, aren't we? It's, as you say, it's sort of point-of-sale material, which is the less sexy end of the sports sponsorship market. But you might argue it's every bit as important as a TV ad spot. Yeah, yeah. One thing for sure is the bigger the company, the slower they move. I mean, there is no agility whatsoever. My friends and sponsors, they have been preparing their campaign for the last three years.

10:53and there are hundreds if not thousands of people in each of the companies involved. They have done workshops in Asia. They have done workshops in Europe, in North America, in Latin America to sell an idea. And then when everybody buys into the idea, they go out and they start talking to the agency and selecting the players. And so this is a very slow process that keeps them busy for sometimes four years. a good workup campaign kicks off weeks after the previous workup has ended so there is no agility whatsoever and that adds up to the frustration when something goes wrong but a lot of the work has already been deployed by the time we are now weeks from the kickoff yeah and the i'm very aware

11:40Ricardo Fort:this is a uk-centric conversation so we're talking about cole palmer we're talking about the england team we're talking about in my mind I'm talking about the UK market your old job as global head of sport at Coca-Cola you're looking UK is just one market in all of them so how do you manage that across the portfolio is it the same are you picking players are there coal palmers in every marketplace or are they just sort of picking a small very select group of elite players and saying okay that's our guy in Germany that's our guy in Brazil that's our guy in Italy how does it work well it is a combination of things so big markets for the business they always have a over representation so the UK is a very large market for most companies it is no question for for Coke so in any global campaign there will be an English player because England and the UK in general is is so big for the business that it makes sense.

12:43Then you go to a couple of other big countries and you may select players. So Brazil is a big market. And in Europe, you got Spain is a big market. So you select based on the needs of the business. And you try to get people that are reasonably global to be able to go to the marketing manager in the Philippines and to tell him or her, hey, this is a great global piece of advertising that works for you because everybody loves Cole Palmer. don't we all and there you go then it's a global campaign so the the idea of personal endorsement

13:17Ricardo Fort:sponsorship as opposed to i mean i always associate and probably wrong it's interesting the personal endorsement thing because my head always goes to pepsi and nike and adidas and coke i always put in the event official box and we've had this conversation in the past about the role of ambassadors and endorsers as an ambush material or trying to build a story when you haven't got the official rights but what we're saying here is that coca-cola is an enormous spender on official rights but it also sees the value in having a col palmo in every marketplace so just talk to me about that because so it's it's not a binary either or decision what's the relationship between the official i paid for to be the official partner of the world cup or fifa partner whatever the iteration of it is but i'm also spending in the athlete marketplace so what does that talk to you about the what you're buying from the and i think there's a question at the end of this about the value of official partnership actually but let's get to that in a minute yeah no you're right about historically there is an idea of uh of coke adidas on one side pepsi nike on the other side and one is about the collective the official the event and the other one is the players but i mean that that's a that's more of a perception and reality.

14:40I mean, all the companies are spending a lot on players. And over the last years, as the role of celebrities and individuals have grown so much because of all the social media possibilities, it became even more important for the companies to have players talking on their behalf. There is no interesting football story without authenticity and authenticity comes from players. So you have to have players, you have to have athletes during the Olympics. So all those companies are investing a lot so if you look around all the campaigns that are running now for all official not so official brands for the workup i'll say that most of them have players because that's the language that most people expect from brands yeah so vinnie jr and you get

15:24Ricardo Fort:to the question of how many sponsors one player can carry and when you're sitting in coke's seat how that plays with the value and the return on investment that and what are you looking for so is it actually again a sort of prior a peripheral view of this would be okay they're looking for some association but just talk to me about whether that's still relevant now what the because you've got these players who are just representing 10 major companies how you cut through so it's almost a mini competition within a vinnie junior who owns vinnie junior in the world cup is a competition compared to as well as who's going to win the sponsorship race in around the world cup itself just to talk to me about the value of players at that level because it feels to me again a superficial reading would be actually it's declining not increasing well i think first you have to acknowledge that there are maybe five players in the world that can carry that many sponsors and these are all premium brands that have a lot of money to spend in in advertising So it is a competition among these sponsors.

16:35The challenge is that most of these brands, they have no idea how many other brands are signing them up before they sign their own deal. So they realized at some point that every commercial break, there are five different brands using Neymar or every commercial break there's, and that's not great. In the previous World Cup, I wrote something about Neymar in Brazil because he was selling everything. There were maybe 14, 15 sponsors and good for him, but not so great for all these 14 brands that now I have no idea if he's selling an apartment or my beverage or digital coins.

17:14Ricardo Fort:I mean, it is a very old sort of relic of marketing, isn't it? The personal endorsement sponsorship. And I wanted to ask you how you see it when we take it from the frame of brand control, slow moving, point of sale, famous face popping in a media environment, which is very about channels and control and rights. and then you take that picture and throw it into today's media environment where you know running into the world cup there'll be people talking about cultural entry points we'd be talking about timothy chamelay and adidas and films and cultural relevance and all of these sort of buzzwords that get thrown about at this time of the year in the run into a tournament how the endorse you know whether it's actually whether you started again from a clean slate you would say right okay let's do what we've always done because there's a sort of security blanket the cfo will like this because there's a sort of proven return model here rather than the more exciting stuff which is less tested less tried in terms of less reliable taught me Let's just try and take the personal endorsement and throw it into today's media environment.

18:34So not every sponsor is sophisticated, as sophisticated as Adidas. So they can go into culture and they can tell stories and they can spend a gazillion dollars to produce something as good as they did. But most companies now, I mean, most companies are going to players and asking them to post a couple of times on Instagram and doing a photo shoot in an hour somewhere near their training grounds. And that's about it. And I think that's the level of football marketing for most brands. A brand that will work two years in advance to get the players and to be able to film at the right time and to get content at the right time and produce and distribute and plan.

19:15I mean, if you take all the big sponsors out, all their postings during the workup, I mean, they have 90 % already written, photographed, and everything is done, waiting for the moment to click. But most brands don't. Most brands are just hoping to get an image from somewhere and doing the workup and tell a story that they don't know yet about it. So, yeah, CFOs will approve safer campaigns and marketing, most of them, they only know how to do safer campaigns. so that's where brands like adidas or coke they would differentiate themselves because they just plan better produce better distribute better let's talk about the phrase cultural relevance

19:57Ricardo Fort:because you can imagine how many times it gets mentioned on a podcast like this people come on and talk about it and they just it's sort of interesting over the last couple of years it's just dropped into industry conversation as though it just suddenly happened i think there's a sort of silliness there's a when you stand back from it a bit i think there's probably we talk about adidas and nike all the time but the sort of those type of brands i can sort of get there i can see that you can build a story about okay they're culturally relevant but when you then get to sort of big conglomerates in other categories that are not the footwear trainer apparel it starts to fall down quite rapidly i mean i don't think culture works in the way that the marketing industry wants it to work i think it's sort of just showing up and posting things about music and film and relate trying to relate it to the world cup i think it's sort of quite transparent i just i think it's a real issue what do you think about the phrase cultural relevance well it's fancy to use cultural relevance as a goal you have to define what cultural relevance is.

21:07I mean, for me, it's being part of the conversation that is happening around something meaningful in the world. So sometimes you are part of the conversation, not for the good reasons. And you were very relevant in that moment when Ronaldo took that Coca-Cola from the press conference. That was culturally relevant and Coke was involved in it. Did they want to be part of this conversation? Certainly not. But then it happened. But I think that some brands, they have the status of being part of conversations. And Nike certainly does. Adidas certainly does. Coca-Cola certainly does. But it's not for every brand.

21:39I remember a CEO of a company that I worked for, he came to my boss and me one day and said, I want people to love our brand so much that they wear our shirts with our brand on it. And I thought, I need to look for a new job. I mean, this is not going to work. Not every brand can be on the T-shirt. So yeah, cultural relevance is for most brands an unachievable goal.

22:05Ricardo Fort:Playing in adjacent areas is again another theme and is now there. And we talk again at the Adidas film with Chamolet and Jude Bellingham and it's sort of New York, Hollywood, but it's also bringing music, Bad Bunny. You're sort of, you can start to see a strategy deck with concentric circles. And I think it's quite interesting how far you can get if you're not talking about football. And then you get to the question of, well, what are we talking about? What relevance is this to the World Cup? So there's a sort of quite an interesting line where you start to say, OK, we could talk about cooking or baking or dance or whatever, gardening.

22:49Ricardo Fort:As long as Ronaldo's doing it, we can still get there. but what's the point but there's a sort of it's quite an interesting time we're at yeah true but listen the the workup is not a football event it happens to have some football but it's brands use the workup for a lot more than football and so i think all of that the baking the fashion the airlines everything works for the workup uh at the workup it wouldn't work for everyday football because in everyday football people care most about football they're not paying a lot of attention to the party around football. So the World Cup is treated for the sponsors in the same way like a Super Bowl.

23:31It's globally relevant in the case of the World Cup event that a lot of people that don't care about football get involved with for different reasons. So we talk to everyone. So for a company that talks to families, to kids, to adults, they use it with different messaging for different audiences. And it works really well because not necessarily a football fan will be sitting in front of the TV eating a lace and drinking a Coke and listening to their Dree phones. All the things that are promoted during the World Cup.

24:04Ricardo Fort:It's quite interesting watching FIFA in America, isn't it? You must have sort of looked at this. And I asked the question the other day in a different context about their ticketing sort of strategy and owning the secondary ticketing market. and that story and i wondered what the impact of the fifa brand is of that because they've sort of no one loves ticketing stub hub ticket master these aren't loved brands but they are functional brand they're part of the machinery of buying in the ticket now fifa's move into becoming stub hub essentially or becoming ticket master i can see it there's a commercial upside of owning the money or getting more money but what do you think about is there an argument to say actually it's not a place they should be playing because they're monetizing the brand via coca-cola and unilever and all these other major sponsors at some point do you think that the there is an impact or do you think it's just the world cup you're going to make that separation argument that it's not about fifa it's about the world cup and football yeah i think the latter i think that It's a big line of business for every event.

25:17And the decision for me is very simple. Should I let anyone else profit from that or should I capture the profits myself? I think that the reputation, the potential reputation problems that can come up from pricing is not as serious as everyday ticketing because everyday ticketing is hitting you every weekend that you want to do something special. And the workup is recognized there's something unique that happens once in my country and i'll be paying more anyway no matter who's selling the ticket because this is special so i think by the end of the day people criticize fifa for what they are doing but it's just i think it's business of sport and they they're they decided to capture the revenues themselves and i think it's the right decision the fifa brand is

26:05Ricardo Fort:interesting so you think it's sort of bulletproof almost they can it's almost priced in there's a separation between FIFA and football in that sense and that brands are telling themselves that it doesn't matter what Infantino does what he does where he turns up in a red hat whatever he's doing that's a sideshow to the football and that's just that is priced into the ticket that's what we're saying I suppose it's just a bulletproof brand from a marketing perspective yes FIFA is a bulletproof The FIFA World Cup is a bulletproof brand. And a lot of people criticize FIFA today, but if you look at FIFA 10, 15 years ago, there were a lot more reasons to criticize them.

26:45And no sponsor canceled their contract. No sponsor did anything, even in the peak of the FIFA crisis. They were all there because everybody knows that the benefits of the association, they outscore by a large margin, whatever is happening in the administration side. So I think the problems of today are small compared to the problems of 15 years ago. And certainly sponsors look at it and stay and they sign and they pay because I think they think the same way. It is one of the least talked about things about the FIFA, the FIFA World Cup, the power of the brand.

27:22Ricardo Fort:It's interesting, isn't it? There's a world, there's a parallel world. I always think that being in charge of the most popular game in the world, you would be a popular organizer you know there is a sort of it could be a unicef type brand there's a there is another world where this there is a different version of sports governing body yeah this is where we disagree i think that anything that a lot of people care about there'll be a lot of opinions and there'll be a lot of disagreements and everybody thinks they have a better solution for whatever they are doing so it is a controversial thing by nature because people love the football and they think they can do that job better than anybody that is there it's like being a coach right how many people love a coach if he didn't win the last the previous game then we hate him so yeah yeah where you then get to i'm just i was trying to think what why we're going back to the start why the cole palmer story people enjoy a story like that and i think it's to do with our relationship with big business and i think is there's a schadenfreude about major brand major conglomerates like coca-cola and fifa and these things that are sort of now other and they are in the one percent in our minds i think the enjoyment that we get from the cole palmer story is something to do with that i think it's to do with look at that massive rich company making a mistake can you see that yeah i don't know richard because most people are sad because the player that they want to see playing is not going to be there and i think we cannot lose perspective of this is what real people are thinking about today and that this is what really matters.

29:15And I think I have a better solution for my national team and the coach is an idiot. And so this is the relationship that the vast majority of the people have with what's happening right now. Now, the two of us and the other people that do things similar to working sports, yeah, some of them may have this, but if they've been around for a little bit, they will know that this kind of things, they will happen. And you may have a laugh because yeah, they got wrong but most people think well these guys are funding all the fun that we have in football so they better be happy with what's going on because otherwise there is no money to pay for everything that the football means to us so yeah I think there might be some people that enjoy seeing the failure of big companies big organizations but yeah it's a tiny portion of everybody that is sad because Cole Palmer is not playing next month.

30:10Ricardo Fort:So you think that fans should praise sponsors for funding sport. And you think that's the sort of, we view fans, view sponsors like Coca-Cola as the good guys who are in a, the old patronage idea of sponsoring something, going back to sort of Renaissance Italy. There is a sponsor and we are providing the money. You think that's what sponsors look like? No, I do not think that. I think that the fans could not care less about who the sponsors are until the sponsors do something that makes sense and it's meaningful, it's interesting for them. And that can be creating content stories that are good to watch, good to read about, giving them things that make their football consumption, if you say, so better.

31:04So unless the sponsors are doing something for the fan, people could not care less about who the sponsors are. And that's why very few people can name them.

31:11Ricardo Fort:Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. And there's also that the media money is so large that the sponsor income is a sort of cherry on the cake now. I can see the argument. I'm old enough to remember that people might give credit for a shirt sponsor or an event sponsor. And it happens at the lower end when the market is very different. But at the top end, that story's gone away, hasn't it? you can't go in i think the idea of official partnership is a really funny one actually i think it's a sort of the idea that there is some relationship that we're supposed to hold up in some yeah yeah well it's certainly not i mean i think that most i think most sponsors they expect fans to love them because they are a sponsor which is totally delusional but it's not the point so It's about what you do with your sponsorship.

32:02And sponsorship is just a license to spend more money telling stories and giving access that other brands may not be able to do.