CELTIC ADIDAS ELITE INDUCTION: GOOD OR BAD FOR SUPPORTERS?
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
Adidas officially confirmed today what we’ve all known for a few weeks already. Celtic are now amongst their top 10 “elite” clubs.
The reliable football news site “Footy Headlines” confirmed that Celtic join fellow newcomers AS Roma, Newcastle United, Liverpool and Aston Villa in the ranks of the “Adidas Elite”.
This means that Celtic will enjoy the same level of attention and targeted marketing from Adidas as the current Adidas Elite clubs Real Madrid, Manchester United, Arsenal, Bayern Munich and Juventus.
Celtic Adidas Elite Status is a Recognition of our Brand Power, But Also Open to Abuse
I’ll be honest, I’m in two minds about this one. Yes, being an Adidas Elite club will open up new markets and new potential revenue streams for Celtic.
It also means that events such as this summer’s “Adidas Cup” game against Newcastle United could become a semi-regular thing.
However, it also means we can expect the normalization of capitalist excesses such as this season’s “authentic” home shirt that retails for 120 pounds. That’s an utterly ridiculous price for a football shirt, unless it’s secretly made of platinum or gold.
Yes, I know, no one is forcing me to buy it, and I won’t be doing so. But also, when something costs about 10 pounds to produce no-one is forcing Adidas and Celtic to sell it for more than a 1000% mark up either, are they?
It’s greedy, it’s shameless and it’s totally unnecessary.
However, it is sadly a mere taste of things to come.
We can expect an absolute barrage of training gear, “commemorative” kits, European kits, and all sorts of other merchandise, that I’m sure will look great, but will also be priced firmly out of the range of the average working man or woman.
I’ll be honest, the more I think about this Adidas deal, the more uneasy I am with it. Yes, Celtic will reach a whole new generation of customers and potential fans thanks to this new level of market penetration and exposure.
However, I am forced to wonder, is the price of it all just a bit too high?
Are we selling out the very soul of our club, the ethos on which it was founded, in order to bring in more money?
What is the end game of all this? We know that, despite numerous crackdown attempts by both manufacturers and international law enforcement, high-quality fakes continue to sell in record numbers.
I can only see this growing. As prices of real merchandize continue to rise, and the counterfeiters continue to find new ways to reproduce items of similar quality, and evade obvious detection, more and more fans will be forced to go for the cheaper alternative.
Both the movie and the music industries made similar attempts to crush piracy more than 2 decades ago. They failed. Ultimately, they simply didn’t offer a product that was worth what they were asking for.
People don’t pirate items because they want free stuff. Ok, maybe some do, but most of them don’t. They do it because the genuine article is either too expensive, or not readily available.
Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify were the happy medium where piracy faded, and the movie and music industries recovered. People didn’t mind paying for a service that was convenient, reasonably priced, and met their requirements.
Now, the streaming model won’t work for football jerseys, obviously, but substantial price cuts would. And its not like Adidas or their “elite” clubs would lose any money. They just wouldn’t make quite as big a profit in the short term.
However, the long term goodwill that more reasonable pricing would build up with supporters would see them, I believe, ultimately make more money in the end.
Unfortunately, short-termism has long been Celtic’s Achilles heel when it comes to commercial ventures. We need to move beyond this way of thinking and see the bigger picture.
Right now, football across Europe is in danger of losing an entire generation of fans, because people have less money than they did before, and supporting a football club has never been more expensive.
This needs to change.