Why Rolex hates football

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My original plan was to do a more analytical approach of what each title sponsor gets for paying “island money” for sponsoring a team or series.

After a subscriber asked me, “What do you get for being a title sponsor?” But I thought it was more boring to write about as the main feature, if you’re interested in reading it. Just email me the words “title sponsors.”

The Luxury Sports Marketing Paradox: Why Rolex Hates Football and LVMH Bought Formula 1

Right, so here's a question that probably keeps zero people awake at night, but it got me thinking one afternoon: Why does Rolex sponsor tennis but not football? And why did LVMH just spend what can only be described as "island money" on Formula 1?

Now, before you say "Well obviously, tennis is posh and football isn't," let me stop you right there. Because that's exactly what they want you to think. The truth is far more calculating, far more cynical, and far more brilliant than simple snobbery.

What we're looking at here is two of the world's most successful luxury companies executing completely opposite strategies. And I mean COMPLETELY opposite. If these were driving philosophies, one would be "drive extremely carefully in a Volvo" and the other would be "floor it in a Lamborghini through a school zone."

The Great Luxury Customer Problem

Let's start with a problem that sounds like the world's smallest violin playing for the world's richest people: What happens when rich people have enough stuff?

LVMH figured this out the hard way. As Athletic Interest put it, "Even if you're super rich, at some point you have enough bags, rings and fancy stuff. Why buy another expensive trunk if you already have 10 at home?"

This is a real problem when your business model is "sell extremely expensive things to extremely rich people." Eventually, even extremely rich people look at their walk-in closets and think, "You know what, maybe I DON'T need another €50,000 handbag that looks suspiciously like the other 47 €50,000 handbags I already own."

Meanwhile, Rolex looked at this same problem and basically said, "Hold my overpriced champagne" and decided to double down on selling to people who can already afford their products. Their solution is to find the sports where people who buy Rolex watches already hang out.

The Anti-Football Strategy

Rolex has a deliberately anti-football strategy. Not because football isn't popular - football is so popular it makes Taylor Swift look like a niche indie artist (T Swifties don’t come for my neck). Rolex avoids football because, and I quote, "it's a sport for the masses" and "Rolex is not a product for the masses."

They looked at the world's most popular sport, watched by literally billions of people, and said, "Nah, too mainstream. We'll stick with tennis, golf, and yachting, thanks."

This is like McDonald's deciding they don't want customers who eat food. Except it's actually brilliant, because Rolex doesn't need more customers - they need the RIGHT customers.

Their core customers are people who've just gotten "a new job, promotion or pay raise" and want to broadcast this fact to everyone within a 50-meter radius. Their second biggest market are parents buying graduation gifts for children, presumably to commemorate the moment little Timmy stops being a financial drain and starts being... well, a different kind of financial drain.

The €150 Million Olympic Experiment

LVMH looked at Rolex's strategy and said, "That's adorable, but we need to sell things to people who don't yet own yachts."

So, they spent €150 million to become the top sponsor of the Paris Olympics. Being the sponsor. They were everywhere. The Olympic torch, Sephora. The uniforms, Berluti. The medals, Chaumet, are made with pieces of the actual Eiffel Tower. The cases holding the medals, Louis Vuitton. The champagne for celebrations, Moët.

By the end of the Olympics, you couldn't celebrate a French victory without inadvertently participating in an LVMH commercial. It was like being trapped inside the world's most expensive advertising campaign, except everyone was voluntarily watching.

The Math Problem

Now here's where the numbers get interesting.

Tennis tournaments like the US Open draw about 750,000 people over two weeks. Formula 1 races draw about 300,000 people over three days. So far, tennis wins, right? Wrong.

Because while tennis reaches about 50 million TV viewers per tournament, F1 reaches 70 million viewers PER RACE. And there are 23 races per season. That's roughly 1.6 billion viewing opportunities per year, compared to maybe 200 million for the major tennis tournaments combined.

Rolex looked at these numbers and thought, "Perfect, we want the smaller audience." LVMH looked at the same numbers and thought, "We'll take the bigger one, please."

The Athlete Investment Strategy

Both companies reveal their thinking, they're they're investing in human beings.

Rolex has turned athlete sponsorship into an art form. Roger Federer has been wearing Rolex for so long that people probably assume he was born with one. Every time he won a Grand Slam, he put on a Rolex before accepting the trophy. Every. Single. Time.

As Federer himself put it: "Every time I put on my Rolex, it reminds me of those great moments. It also reminds me that if you do not work hard, somebody else will, and they eventually will pass you."

That's the best athlete endorsement in poetry. Dark, competitive poetry about the relentless march of time and human ambition, but poetry nonetheless.

LVMH takes a different approach. They've figured out that modern athletes are "cultural icons" who "influence what we wear, how we think, and even what we value." Athletes like Naomi Osaka use social media to build personal brands that extend far beyond their sport.

Osaka discusses social issues, fashion preferences, and cultural identity with millions of followers. For Louis Vuitton, she's a lifestyle influencer who happens to be extremely good at hitting a ball with a racquet.

The Structural Advantage Problem

Both companies have structural advantages that make their strategies possible.

Rolex is owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, which means it's technically a non-profit organization. This allows them to "say no to short-term profit to ensure the longevity and strength of the brand." They can afford to be picky about customers because they don't have shareholders demanding quarterly growth.

LVMH has the opposite advantage: they're so massive they can do marketing campaigns that individual brands could never afford. They control 75 brands and generate almost €100 billion in annual revenue. When they want to sponsor something, they completely take it over.

The Time Horizon Trap

Both strategies have a fundamental problem, and it's the kind of problem that keeps business school professors awake at night writing case studies.

Rolex's exclusivity model works perfectly until it doesn't. Their core audience is aging, and younger generations are more likely to check the time on their smartphones than buy a luxury watch. You can only exclude so many potential customers before you run out of actual customers.

LVMH's aspiration model works until it works too well. The more accessible luxury becomes, the less luxurious it feels. If everyone can afford Louis Vuitton, then Louis Vuitton stops being special. It's the luxury brand equivalent of a restaurant becoming so popular that you stop wanting to eat there.

I can be proven wrong, but both strategies have expiration dates.

Rolex can't maintain exclusivity forever in a world where fewer people see the point of expensive timepieces. LVMH can't expand forever without diluting what makes luxury actually luxurious.

The future of luxury sports marketing belongs to whichever company figures out how to solve both problems simultaneously - maintaining exclusivity while enabling growth, staying special while reaching more people.