On Didn't Sign Mbappe. They bought a category.
Most athlete deals are awareness machines. They generate impressions, not growth, and the peak athlete is the most expensive version. On's deals are structured differently, and the evidence for that distinction is worth around half a billion dollars. The question is whether the model translates from running shoes to football boots.
When On announced their entry into football alongside Kylian Mbappe this week, the instinctive read was that a Swiss running brand had bought an awareness machine at peak price. At his zenith. At Real Madrid. Nowhere to go but down in terms of visibility.
That reading is how most athlete deals work. It is not how On has operated for the last seven years, and understanding the difference is what separates a tactical critique from an actual analysis of what just happened.
I came into this research with the critique ready. Signing athletes generates impressions. It does not fundamentally drive growth. Nike loses Mbappe and gets the money back to sign Lamine Yamal and five others at better expected value. The standard argument is strong, and I pre-registered it before looking at anything.
Two of my predictions were wrong in ways that changed the piece.
Mbappe plays for Real Madrid, who have a kit deal with Adidas worth a reported €110 million per season, recently extended to 2034. My prediction was that this would prevent him from wearing On boots in competitive matches — a structural block that would reduce the deal to lifestyle content and training footage.
That was wrong about how football works. Club kit deals and personal boot sponsorship are entirely separate categories. The kit deal covers jerseys, shorts, socks — worn by the squad because the club supplies them. Boot deals are personal to the player, negotiated independently, and have nothing to do with the club's kit supplier.
Mbappe wore Nike boots at Real Madrid for two full seasons while the club trained and played in Adidas kit. Gareth Bale wore Nike boots at Adidas-kitted Real Madrid. This is standard practice across European football. There is no conflict, and On can put Mbappe on a pitch in the Champions League from day one.
That matters because the boot is the product. Not the jersey. The product story is live from the first competitive match.
I framed the deal as an endorsement and critiqued it as one. It is not an endorsement.
Roger Federer's estimated current stake value in On, from a deal that began in 2019 with roughly 3 percent equity and product co-design responsibilities. His career prize money was approximately $130 million. The investment has been worth nearly four times that.
Federer did not endorse On. He invested in them before the partnership was announced, worked with their design team on new products before anything went public, took a reported three percent stake, and became the brand signal that helped them cross from running into tennis and then lifestyle. On went public in September 2021 at a valuation of roughly $11 billion. Federer's return on his initial position has been estimated at approximately 2,480 percent.
Pre-announcement reporting on the Mbappe deal, later confirmed accurate, described the same structure: equity shares and his own sub-brand within On's football line, not a standard endorsement fee. The press release language is worth reading literally — Mbappe will “work directly with On's product teams, integrating his elite perspective into the development and testing of future football footwear.” Thierry Henry, who is announced simultaneously as Director of Football, has been operating inside On since late 2025.
This is not a marketing department activation. This is the Federer model applied to football, built over the better part of a year before anyone outside the company knew it was happening.
On's trajectory since 2019 follows a legible pattern. Start in running, where the technology story — CloudTec®, the patented cushioning system — creates genuine product differentiation. Use running credibility to enter adjacent categories. Use the athlete model not to buy awareness but to buy category permission and co-design input from the highest available level of each sport.
| Standard endorsement | On's model | |
|---|---|---|
| What the athlete does | Wears the product, appears in campaigns | Co-designs the product, takes equity |
| What the brand gets | Awareness and association | Product development input, category signal, aligned incentives |
| When it pays off | During the campaign | When the product is good enough to justify the premium |
| What athlete peak buys | Maximum impressions now | Maximum product credibility at category entry |
| Risk | Awareness without conversion | Product development fails or takes longer than the athlete's prime |
Neither model is universally right. The standard endorsement generates predictable short-term value. On's model generates nothing until the product works, then compounds.
On's 2026 revenue is projected at roughly $3.8 billion, growing at roughly 23 percent. Their current football revenue is zero. The global football boot market is approximately $4 billion annually, with Adidas holding around 35 percent and Nike around 30. Getting to ten percent of that market — what Nike built over decades — would add $400 million to On's top line.
That is what they are buying. Not the Mbappe impression. The football category.
Two things I came in expecting to find still hold after the research, and they are the reasons this is not a simple success story.
What the Federer model actually required
2019–2026Federer joined On in running — the category On had built over nine years. His product input was adjacent to what already worked. His consumer profile (premium, performance-oriented, global) matched the product On had already developed. The category entry he enabled was tennis, which shares biomechanics, retail channels and consumer profile with running. The model compounded because the product was already proven and the adjacency was real.
Football is not adjacent. The footwear mechanics are different — lateral stability, stud pressure distribution, ball touch through the upper are requirements that running and tennis do not have. The retail channel is different: elite players operate within club kit ecosystems, boot fitting rooms, and brand obligations that the individual consumer does not. The consumer profile for premium football boots skews global south and young in ways that On's current base does not.
The Federer model worked in part because the extension was logical. Mbappe is not a logical extension of On's existing system. He is a category bet that requires On to build something genuinely new, not apply what already works to a new face.
The second surviving critique is the one that the press release cannot answer, because no product exists yet to answer it. On's LightSpray™ technology — a robotic manufacturing process that creates a continuous sprayed filament upper — is plausible as a football innovation in theory. It is extremely light, precise in fit, and close to the foot. Whether it can handle the mechanical demands of elite football is a question being answered in a lab in Zurich as this is published. The announcement is not the result. The boot is the result, and nobody has seen it.
Nike and Adidas have decades of elite player feedback embedded in their boot construction. Their mould-fit programs are built into the culture of professional football at the club level. On is entering against two incumbents who have not been standing still.
- Do elite players other than Mbappe choose to wear it? Mbappe will wear it because he is an equity partner. The signal is whether players without a financial stake choose it in competitive matches. That is the product story working, and it is observable.
- Does the LightSpray™ upper survive elite play? Premium running shoe technology has failed to transfer to football before — the demands are different enough that a boot can feel extraordinary in training and underperform in a competitive match. The 24-month window is the test.
- Does On's existing consumer follow them into football? On's base is premium, performance-oriented and runs. Football fandom does not map cleanly onto that base, particularly at the youth end where the market actually develops. If football becomes a separate consumer acquisition rather than an extension, the economics look different.
- Is this about the boot or the stock? On is a public company trading at a premium multiple. Announcing football with Mbappe and Thierry Henry moves the stock. If the product doesn't arrive in 24 months, the market will know what the announcement was for.
If you are making a partnership decision, write down which of the two models you are running — and whether the rest of the decision follows from the one you wrote down.
Most partnerships start as an awareness decision and get described as a co-creation decision once the press release is drafted. The test is simple: does the athlete change what gets built, or only who sees it? If the answer is the latter, the economics are awareness economics — impression volume, campaign timing, fee against reach — and they should be evaluated on that basis. If the answer is the former, the economics are product economics, and the question is whether the athlete's input produces something that works, and on what timeline. Both are legitimate models. The mistake is applying the wrong scorecard to the one you chose.
- What it costs
- Forty-five minutes before the deal is signed, writing two sentences: what the athlete changes about the product, and what the product does in two years that it would not do without them. If neither sentence survives a plain reading, you are running the awareness model at co-creation prices.
- How you'll know
- Two years out, you can point to a product that exists because of this partnership and performs differently because of their input. Awareness value is real but does not require this test. Product value requires it.
On's most important innovation over the past seven years was not CloudTec® or LightSpray™. It was the decision to treat the athlete relationship as a product decision rather than a marketing one. That choice produced the Federer outcome. It is the framework they are applying to football.
Whether the framework survives the translation is the only question that matters. The boot does not exist yet, and the answer is in the boot.
Related from Sound Decisions: The Memory Isn't Yours · Poppi Didn't Go Viral by Accident · Grüns' Decisions Before Growth
One conversation. Which model your next partnership is actually running.
Not a brand audit. Writing two sentences before the deal is signed, and testing whether what they say is true.
Get a free positioning review Or read the frameworks →