Tom Brady is not only the only American football player to have won seven professional league championships in the United States, but also one of the most astute businessmen that exist today in American sports capable of turning everything it touches into gold.
Brady’s qualities as an athlete are already part of the history of the National Football League (NFL), the professional American football league in the United States: the record of victories as “quarterback (264), most valuable player in the Super Bowl ( 5), distance of passes, assists, times he has started, “touchdowns” … the list is practically endless.
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Brady has also been able to convert in one year the team with the worst numbers in the NFL, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which last season had a winning percentage of just 0.387 since it began competing in the league in 1976, in the this year’s Super Bowl champion.
But 43 years old, Brady is known in the sports world for both his entrepreneurial mindset and his athletic achievements to the point that, at times, his ability to be a kind of modern Midas king who turns everything into dollars that touches exceeds its sports consideration.
A MODERN MIDAS KING
When Brady left the New England Patriots last season, the team he joined in 2000 and which provided six NFL championships over 20 years, some analysts pointed out that the move of the “quarterback” from Boston to Tampa Bay obeyed much more for marketing reasons than sports.
Few thought that a player in the final stages of his career could make the Buccaneers, a winning team. But many were convinced that Brady’s halo would spell an economic bonanza for Tampa Bay, the team that in the four years prior to his arrival was the worst in the NFL in attendance.
As Mike Ozanian then noted in Forbes magazine, “Brady will bring more than his arm to Tamba Bay. He will bring his brand and the Glazer family, which owns the Bucs, hopes that he will drive the team’s brand.”
Ozanian was right. Partly. Because Brady has shown that he is a Midas king in and out of the stadium. But unlike the Greek myth, which achieved its power thanks to the generosity of the gods, Brady has earned it hard.
When Brady came to the NFL in 2000, the San Mateo, California player was far from being considered a star. The New England Patriots selected him in the sixth round of that year’s draft, basically 199th and after six other quarterbacks were selected by the teams.
THE BRADY BRAND
Two years later, Brady had become the head of the Boston team and began working on creating his own brand. In 2005, he presented the popular television program Saturday Night Live, a true catapult in the United States and that same year he voiced his character in “The Simpsons.”
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Brady began to combine his work as a ball thrower with occasional jobs as a model, actor or representative of brands like Under Armor, Aston Martin or Uggs.
And in 2007, he began dating the Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen whom he married in 2009. Bündchen is no stranger to the power of personal branding: in 2007 she was already the 16th richest woman in the entertainment world and in 2014 she was among the 100 most powerful women in the world.
The union with Bündchen did nothing but consolidate the Brady brand. In 2013, the athlete shaped his brand with the creation of TB12, a company currently dedicated to nutrition and sports performance that sells everything from t-shirts and sweatshirts to dietary supplements to sports equipment.
Currently, TB12 generates $ 20.3 million in revenue. At the same time that the player created TB12, the Brady-Bündchen couple began to exploit the possibilities of social media to strengthen their image. In 2014, they started sharing personal photos and videos on Facebook and Instagram.
THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA
When Brady shared an old resume on Facebook in 2014, the post generated nearly 47,000 “likes” and 12,000 comments and became an instant talking point on sports television shows.
As the analysts pointed out, Brady and Bündchen didn’t need the extra attention from the networks. But the strategy allowed them to “humanize their brand”, make Brady “closer, more involved, more available and gives consumers something to talk about. That is what each brand should aspire to,” as one specialist noted.
The complexity of Brady’s business success goes beyond financial numbers. Brady was the highest-paid player in this year’s Super Bowl, earning an annual salary of $ 25 million. But he’s not the highest-paid quarterback in Super Bowl history (Jimmy Garoppolo made $ 27.5 million last year).
He’s not even the highest-paid player in the NFL – he’s currently ranked 15th based on NFL data.
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But according to Forbes, Brady is ranked 21st among the most valuable athletes in the world in 2020 (the first is tennis player Roger Federer). And Celebrity Net Worth values Brady’s estate at $ 200 million. Between 2000 and 2019, the player earned $ 100 million from advertising and the publication predicts that by the end of his two-year contract with the Bucs the figure will have risen to 140 million.
And when the assets of the Brady-Bündchen couple are combined, the figure rises to $ 600 million.