Domestic brands are fighting for Chinese football market

In January, Nike invested 1 billion RMB to Chinese Football Association and signed a partnership contract with CFA. Therefore, the famous sports brand will supply Chinese football national teams with kits in the following twelve years. The partnership made Nike get the access to the most resource of China’s football market.

In the past two years, football had almost become the favorite for Chinese commercial investors due to the support of government as well as the development of football industry. Recently, it is reported that Anta had signed Zheng Zhi, the captain of Chinese football team, as its brand ambassador. In May, similarly, 361° announced to sign with Yang Xu, another player of Chinese football team. That is to say, many investors held an optimistic attitude towards Chinese football market, and finding a splendid brand ambassador had become their starting point of stepping into the field of football.

Actually, the first peak for Chinese companies’ sponsoring football players appeared in 2002. At that time, Li-Ning announced to sign Li Tie as its brand ambassador with 1 million dollars. Afterwards, Zhao Junzhe and Wang Xinxin also chose Li-Ning as their sponsor company. In the following several years, however, many Chinese sports brands chose to quit from football due to the poor performance of Chinese football team, thus almost all Chinese players was once swallowed by Nike and Adidas. Only in these two or three years, Chinese brands began to show their recovery and new ambition. The major pushing power of the recovery is the inclination of China’s policy.

Up to now, besides China’s domestic sports brands, more and more companies are conducting their investment in football. For example, CFLD finished the acquisition of a football club of Chinese First League. What’s more, during the past 2014, Alibaba announced to buy 50% of shares from Guangzhou Evergrande, and Suning declared to cooperate with FC Barcelona. All those facts might reveal that the development of China’s football marketing has come into a golden age.

In the whole system of sports industry, football played almost the most important role. The total value of China’s football market is about 800 billion RMB. The huge potential is the chief reason why more and more China’s domestic brands chose to invest in football. Chinese brands are constantly fighting for the resource of football market.