Nike signed Kylian Mbappé when he was eight years old. Eighteen years, two Golden Boots, and a World Cup goalscoring record later, his contract expired this summer and Nike let it lapse. Days after that, Mbappé signed with On, the Swiss sportswear company, becoming its first football athlete and taking an equity stake in the deal rather than a flat endorsement fee. Nike’s public statement on the split was warm. It also marked the second time in eight years that Nike has let a genuinely generational athlete walk, only to watch him build serious wealth with the exact same rival.
The first time was Roger Federer, and the story of how that happened is almost too specific to be a coincidence.
How Nike Lost Federer
Federer’s Nike deal, a ten-year, $10 million-a-year contract signed in 2008, was set to expire in February 2018. His agent, Tony Godsick, spent more than a year trying to get it renewed, starting with a meeting at Nike’s Beaverton headquarters in January 2017. Two weeks after that meeting, Federer won the Australian Open. Seven months later, he won Wimbledon. Still, Nike wouldn’t commit to new terms. Godsick later recounted the whole saga on Andy Roddick’s Served podcast, describing his own growing panic as the clock ran out: “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.”
Nike let the deal expire anyway. “He didn’t leave Nike,” Godsick said. “Nike kind of left him, you know? We were trying to re-sign, and they chose not to re-sign. He would have stayed.”
What happened next is the part that makes the story worth telling. Godsick tried to get a meeting with Uniqlo’s founder, Tadashi Yanai, and couldn’t get through. Over breakfast in New York, he mentioned the problem to Anna Wintour, who knew Yanai personally and made the introduction happen. Uniqlo offered Federer $300 million over ten years, with no performance clauses and no appearance requirements attached, more than triple what Nike had been paying him. Federer, still one of the biggest names in sport, signed the apparel deal and then went looking for a shoe partner. He found one minutes from his home in Switzerland: a small running company called On, known mostly within hardcore running circles for its unusual pod-based cushioning technology.
Rather than take a standard sponsorship, Federer invested roughly $50 million for equity in 2019 and became a genuine partner in the business, working directly with the founders on product design. We’ve told the fuller story of how Federer structured that entire post-Nike period into the most lucrative chapter of his career elsewhere, so we won’t repeat the full arc here. The short version that matters for this story: when On went public in 2021, Federer’s stake was suddenly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, on top of the $300 million Uniqlo deal Nike had, in effect, handed to a competitor by letting him walk.
Then Nike Did It to Mbappé Too
Mbappé’s Nike relationship ran even longer than Federer’s, starting when he was still a child prospect in France. It carried him through his rise at Monaco, his stint at PSG, his move to Real Madrid, and a 2026 World Cup campaign in which he scored enough to surpass Lionel Messi as the tournament’s all-time leading goalscorer, wearing Nike’s Mercurial boots the entire way. When his contract expired after the tournament, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC that Nike chose not to renew it, “deciding to put its endorsement money elsewhere.” Nike is reportedly directing more of its football budget toward Erling Haaland and Vinícius Júnior instead, both seen as central to the next decade of the brand’s soccer strategy rather than the last one.
On moved quickly. The company had been building a football division quietly since late 2025, hiring Thierry Henry, the former Arsenal and France striker, as its Director of Football before publicly announcing the role. Barcelona’s Sydney Schertenleib had already signed on as a training and lifestyle ambassador in December 2025, giving On a foothold in women’s football ahead of the men’s side. Mbappé’s arrival turned that quiet groundwork into On’s first real statement of intent in the sport, and by his own account, the appeal wasn’t the money. “What drew me to On was the opportunity to build something entirely new together that will help shape tomorrow’s game,” he said. “I want to bring my experience and perspective into what we create, push what’s possible through innovation, and always stay true to the joy of football.” The equity structure of the deal, confirmed by multiple outlets, mirrors the Federer arrangement closely: Mbappé becomes a stakeholder in what On’s football division turns into, rather than simply a face fronting the campaign.
Mbappé is also not Nike’s only recent loss in football. Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal left Nike for Adidas in 2024, meaning the company has now lost three of its most marketable young football signings within a two-year window, to two different competitors, at exactly the moment both athletes were becoming genuinely global names rather than promising prospects.
The Numbers Nike Would Rather Not Discuss
The financial gap between the two companies makes the pattern harder to write off as bad luck. On’s revenue reached roughly $3.72 billion in 2025, growing 34% at constant currency and marking the third consecutive quarter the company raised its own guidance. Gross margins hit 64%, comfortably ahead of Nike’s roughly 43%, Adidas’s 39%, and Puma’s 44%. On’s stock has broadly rewarded investors through a period when Nike’s has fallen close to 80% over five years, based on Sportico’s reporting alongside the Mbappé announcement. Nike’s own fiscal 2025 results told the other half of the story: revenue down nearly 10% year over year, net income forecast to drop 44%, and margins compressing from 13% to roughly 8.4%.
On has used that momentum to expand far beyond the running specialty stores where it started, a trajectory we’ve covered in more detail in the full story of how On Running’s technology turned it into a genuine rival to Nike. The company now holds around 40% of the Swiss running shoe market, 10% in Germany, and 6.6% of the US performance running category, a remarkable foothold for a company competing against rivals with fifty-year head starts. Football, until Mbappé signed, was a category On hadn’t touched at all. Nike just handed it one of the most bankable names in the sport to build that category with.
Two Data Points Aren’t Proof, But They’re Not Nothing
Losing one legendary athlete could reasonably be chalked up to a single bad call. Nike had defensible reasons in both cases: Federer was 36 and near retirement in 2018, and Mbappé, while only 27 and coming off a career-best World Cup, reportedly wanted terms Nike wasn’t prepared to match given its own financial pressure. Reallocating endorsement spending toward Haaland and Vinícius, both with a decade of prime years ahead of them, is a rational allocation decision on paper.
What’s harder to explain away is the destination. Both athletes didn’t just leave Nike, they left for the same company, on the same equity-partner structure, at two points nearly a decade apart when Nike was already fighting to explain a declining stock price and shrinking market share to its own investors. A single missed re-signing is a personnel call. Two identical outcomes, funneling two of the sport’s most recognizable names into the same rival’s ownership structure, during the same prolonged slide, starts to look less like coincidence and more like something Nike’s internal process keeps failing to catch.
Nike is currently mid-turnaround under CEO Elliott Hill, and there are early signs the worst of the revenue decline has passed. Whether that turnaround ultimately succeeds has very little to do with Mbappé specifically; no single athlete deal will decide Nike’s next five years. But every time the company lets a genuine superstar walk directly into On’s ownership structure, it hands its most dangerous competitor a louder platform at precisely the moment Nike can least afford the comparison being drawn.
