Those of us who follow the collision of celebrity, sports and business are doomed to an endless stream of statistics. Tiger Woods earned $87 million from endorsements last year, $48 million more than Phil Mickelson, golf's next-highest earner. Manchester United's merchandise revenue was $23.6 million, more than any other team in England's Premiership. Walt Disney's ESPN charges an average monthly subscription fee of $3.26, by far the highest rate of any U.S. basic cable channel. The 2007 Super Bowl generated $2.6 million per 30-second television commercial, the highest rate in sports history.
But what do these numbers tell us about the brand value attached to these athletes, teams, businesses and sporting events, exactly? After all, it is their brand value — the image that has been etched in our minds over time when we hear these names — that best measures their power in the world of sports, their ranking among peers.
Properly calibrated, the numbers tell us that Tiger Woods is the most valuable brand among athletes, worth $64 million. The name Manchester United, valued at $351 million, is first among teams. The ESPN brand is worth $7.5 billion and is No. 1 among sports businesses. The Super Bowl, which produced $336 million in revenue, is the richest sporting event brand.
Our inaugural Forbes Fab 40 ranks the top 10 sports brands in four categories: athletes, teams, businesses and events. Our values were not compiled based on a popularity contest or online survey. We used that same type of quantitative analysis that bankers, companies, agents, teams, athletes and sponsors use to analyze sports properties. While polls provide you with a Kodak moment, brand values measure the equity built up in a name over years or even decades.
Athletes' brand values were based on the amount by which their endorsement income for the past year exceeded the average of their peers, because it is their appeal to Madison Avenue that best reflects their image, not their earnings from competition or what, in some cases, their teams pay them. For example, Tiger Woods pulled in $87 million in endorsement income last year, $64 million more than the average for the top 10 professional golfers.
We do not include tour winnings in calculating Woods' brand value, because his name (like those of the other athletes in our top 10) has become such a powerful force — created through years of incredible golf and meticulous public relations — that unless he were to have a Michael Vick-type meltdown, his endorsement income would continue to pour in if he were to retire tomorrow (think Michael Jordan writ large).
Woods' top agreements with Nike and General Motors are valued at more than $150 million in aggregate over the life of their contracts, and while the terms of his partnership with American Express were not renewed, a new $100 million deal with Gatorade is in the works.
Manchester United is not the best soccer team in the world, or even in Europe. The team has not won the FA Cup since 2004. But say "ManU" almost anywhere on the planet (it is the most-recognized sports team in China) and people know who you are talking about. Credit the team's long and rich history (a record 11 FA Cups) and loyal fans (the team had ticket revenue of $132 million in 2005-2006, tops among soccer even though its stadium is much smaller than those of AC Milan or Barcelona). In calculating a team's brand value, we eliminate those factors that are not directly tied to its name, such as demographics and revenue streams shared equally with the other teams in its league.
We value the Manchester United brand at $351 million, which represents 24 percent of the team's enterprise value (equity plus net debt). ManU's brand value includes portions of their $94 million in annual sponsorship revenue and $70 million television rights fees. Observation: Soccer's Real Madrid and Bayern Munich are worth, in their entirety, $1 billion and $838 million, respectively, vs. $1.2 billion for baseball's New York Yankees.
But Real and Bayern have higher brand values ($288 million and $255 million, respectively) than the Bronx Bombers ($217 million). This is because a higher percentage of Real and Bayern's revenue are derived from sources they do not have to share with other teams from their home countries (merchandise), or revenue sources they have to share less of than the Yankees do with their rivals (television).
ESPN takes the top spot among sports businesses with a brand value of $7.5 billion. Business brands are valued based on the amount by which their market value exceeds their book value relative to the industry norm. Last year, ESPN amassed an estimated $6 billion in revenue thanks to their growing stable of five domestic networks (including Spanish offering ESPN Deportes), regional syndication service, magazine, Web site and international platforms. The network normally has an operating margin of 23 percent, giving it operating income (in essence, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $1.4 billion. ESPN's estimated market value of $22 billion is $7.5 billion more than a network without the ESPN name would be worth.
Nike comes in second among sports business brands with a value of $5.6 billion. The 2008 Olympics in Beijing will allow Nike to show off its swoosh logo and enhance its brand in Asia, which represents a huge opportunity for growth.
We value sporting event brands by calculating revenue-per-event-day. While much of the world still stands still every four years for the Summer Olympics ($176 million in event-day revenue) and soccer's World Cup ($103 million), it's the Super Bowl that derives the most money from broadcasting, sponsorships, gate receipts, licensed merchandise and online platforms, giving it a brand value of $336 million. The Super Bowl highlights the extent to which the NFL has morphed into a marketing genius over the past four decades.
The first Super Bowl was played in 1967 in the Los Angeles Coliseum, and there were so many empty seats you could have bought a ticket right before kickoff for next to nothing. Television viewership was not much better. Super Bowl Sunday is now a quasi-national holiday and tickets are next to impossible to get (less than 1 percent of the game's tickets are available to the general public through a random drawing) and very expensive (the average price for a ticket during the 2007 Super Bowl was $614), and ratings are through the roof (three of the four most-watched television programs in the U.S. have been Super Bowls). It is hard to imagine the event losing its top spot no matter how long the halftime show gets.