Michael Jordan, a legend that never dies. The former American basketball champion, considered by many to be the greatest sportsman of all time, strikes again, almost 20 years after his definitive retirement from playing basketball (he is now the owner of the Charlotte Hornets franchise) and 22 years after his last unforgettable exploit on the NBA court, the sixth title won (third consecutive, after the three consecutive ones from 91 to 93) with the Chicago Bulls in the spring of 1998. That last "dance", shored up with the victory in the final against Utah thanks precisely to Jordan's decisive shot, as – or even better than – in a Hollywood film, is told in recent weeks by the docu-series entitled precisely “The Last Dance”, aired on Netflix in 10 episodes, published two at a time every Monday (May 18 in Italy shops and restaurants reopen, but the last two episodes of the saga are also out).
The product is the media event of the year, perhaps favored by the lockdown and the absence of live sport: a real blockbuster, with over 500 minutes of images, videos, interviews and background stories, mostly unpublished, which reconstruct the year by year, game by game, the epic story of the great champion. “The Last Dance” is pure poetry for basketball fans, but not only: the pace, quality and transversality of the docu-series, which also tells the story of America in those years and is enhanced by interviews with former presidents Bill Clinton (at the White House in those years) and Barack Obama (born in Chicago and a huge of the Bulls), have also conquered the general public. Yet another economic miracle of the Jordan brand has been achieved which still today, thanks to the agreement with Nike signed in the late 80s, allows the champion to take home the beauty of 130 million dollars a year. Not even today's star, LeBron James, will surpass him, despite having signed with the multinational of the swoosh (the horizontal comma, his symbol) a $1 billion lifetime contract.
This time Jordan and his legend, rekindled by the series aired on Netflix, have even defeated the coronavirus. In fact, Nike is the only one, among the large sportswear companies, to have held its own in the first quarter of 2020. Indeed, its turnover, thanks to online sales, even grew by 5%, despite the gigantic international crisis which has instead overwhelmed the rivals of Under Armor (-32%) and Adidas (sales -19%, with forecasts of -40% in the second quarter): the German company, also penalized by the postponement of the football and the Tokyo Olympics, saw profits plummet by 95% and even had to resort to a 3 billion loan granted by the government and valid until July 2021. How come the crisis hasn't overwhelmed Nike instead? Simple: the shoes. The Air Jordan 5, released a few weeks ago at the same time as the launch of the documentary, were snapped up in the United States in a few hours, also thanks to the reinvigorated (but in reality never dormant) cult of the champion.
These collectible shoes they cost an average of $140 and have become the flagship product of Nike e-commerce, which after the suspension of the axis with Amazon decided at the end of 2019 has increasingly focused on direct sales, with the results we are seeing. The story of the Air Jordans is told in one of the episodes of "The Last Dance", and for Adidas it almost tastes like a joke. Jordan was welcomed into the NBA as a star, but at the time the official shoe supplier was Converse, which already had an agreement with the great champions of the time (Magic Johnson and Larry Bird above all) and therefore would not have created a personalized line for the rising star. So came the proposal from Nike, which at the time was not today's multinational but a lesser known company, which mainly produced running shoes: Jordan initially refused because he would have preferred to link his name and career to Adidas, but thanks to his agent it went as we know.
From the first commercial, shot by Spike Lee and which also launched the trend of basketball shoes as a symbolic object of urban culture, to the timeless logo depicting a famous dunk of the number 23 at the All Star Game, up to the blockbuster series that stopped the coronavirus crisis: even today, Michael Jordan is the greatest champion ever and the biggest deal for the company he sponsored.
