Roger Federer’s agent said ‘Nike left him’ after the Swiss athlete moved from the American company to join Uniqlo on a $300m deal.
Before he made the switch, Federer was one of the most famous Nike athletes in the world and had been wearing clothes and shoes with the famous ‘Swoosh’ on them since 1994.
But their partnership came to an end when the tennis great moved to Uniqlo in 2018 in what many thought was Federer turning his back on Nike.
Now though, Federer’s agent Tony Godsick has claimed it was actually the other way round.
“He didn’t leave Nike. Nike kind of left him, you know?” Godsick said on Andy Roddick’s Served podcast. “We were trying to re-sign, and they chose not to re-sign. He would have stayed.
“I spent from 2017, the contract was ending in February of 2018, a 10-year deal. We started in 2008. I spent one year, from the beginning of 17, all the way till when it ended, trying to renew it.”
Nike’s side of the story is they did not see Federer in the same light as the likes of LeBron James and Tiger Woods but their tennis director at the time Mike Nakajima later described it as “atrocity.”
“That should never have happened. For us to let somebody like that go, it’s an atrocity,” Nakajima is quoted in the book The Roger Federer Effect. “Roger Federer belonged with Nike for the rest of his career. Just like Michael Jordan. Like LeBron James, like Tiger Woods. He’s right up there with the all-time greatest Nike athletes ever. I’m still disappointed. But it happened. I have to get over it. It wasn’t my decision and I wasn’t there for it.”
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Ultimately though, Nike allowed Federer to look elsewhere and it was Japan where they ended up.
Godsick recalled the story: “I cannot believe this. I’m gonna go down as the agent who could not renew. Not just the greatest guy, but the greatest tennis player in history. And he won a bunch of majors recently. What a loser, Tony.
“Everybody was like, ‘Yeah, right. No, thank you.’ I remember one brand said, ‘He’s already branded Nike. We’re not interested.’ Another company said, ‘We would like to do it if we get to wait until next year, because this is the year of our founder, and we don’t want to dilute his own thing.’
‘The first thing [Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai] asked me was, who else are you here to see in Japan?’ I told him no one else. So he said ‘We’ll give you more time than 30 minutes.’ But then, he asked the really good question, which is, ‘Are you here to use me?’”
When Yanai realized that Federer’s agent was there to talk business, the two parties eventually agreed on a deal worth $300 million over 10 years with three years still left to run.
The deal is valued as the fifth-most lucrative for a player in sports history behind Lionel Messi with Adidas and LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo and Michael Jordan all with Nike.
It would appear Nike have though learned their lesson with Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka all signed up to deals.
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