Football and the Limits of Personal Branding: Lessons from a Celebrity Food Brand

A 55-year-old comedian has sold more than one million tubs of salsa since January 2026. His product reached Kroger on October 4 and H-E-B on November 4 of the same year, backed by Jimmy Kimmel and the cast of a dancing show. There is not a single pass in this story. Yet the way it unfolded is exactly what almost every commercial director at a European football club is trying to copy: a familiar face, a new product, and a retail rollout speed that football cannot match.

At 43, I still talk hot, but the fire has learned to wait. I have spent 27 years reading scorelines and rewatching footage, and what has bothered me most over the past decade is not a tactical mistake, but the way football convinces itself that it is merely a consumer branding company.

To understand why, you have to look at the revenue structure of modern football. The three pillars — broadcast rights, commercial and matchday — have shifted their centre of gravity over two decades. For many big clubs, commercial revenue plus broadcast rights account for more than 70 per cent of total income, while direct ticket money has shrunk into a small slice. When the main source of income no longer comes from the stands but from contracts and sponsors, the operating logic changes too: the club starts thinking like a brand, not like a team.

That is why a salsa brand is worth dissecting, even though it contains not a single minute of football. It shows the formula football is copying — and it also shows where that formula breaks.

The foundation of the celebrity food wave is three variables: a face that already has a following, a product simple enough to try, and a retail system wide enough to turn curiosity into sales. The founder of this brand has all three. He is famous from television, the product is a cheap and easy side dish, and the two retail chains are the names with the greatest reach.

Football tries to copy exactly those three variables. The familiar face: a star player, a branded coach, or the club itself. The easy-to-try product: shirts, digital content, stadium experiences. The distribution system: social media, global broadcast channels, online stores. On paper, everything matches.

Over the past decade, more and more top players have launched their own brands — perfume, fashion, food — and clubs have turned stadiums into shopping centres. The line between a football team and an entertainment company is blurring.

But there is a fourth variable that the consumer food industry does not have, and that football cannot ignore: competitive results. A good tub of salsa is a good tub of salsa, no matter who sells it. A club that wins or loses changes the value of its own brand. Here is the breaking point: football sells a product whose quality is decided on the pitch, not in the marketing meeting room. When a club invests in its brand faster than in its squad, it is building a shop on uncompacted ground.

I have tracked this across many seasons. A club's commercial revenue typically spikes after a trophy and stalls after two trophyless seasons. The correlation between on-pitch results and commercial growth is not instant, but it has a clear lag: about 12 to 18 months. In other words, a football brand is a dependent variable, not an independent one.

The celebrity food industry is the opposite. The founder of the salsa brand does not need to win a single match to sell one more tub. He only needs to hold attention. Attention is the only asset, and it can be regenerated with new content. Football has no such privilege. A club cannot release a new season like a product line; it has to play, and it has to win.

This explains a paradox I see repeated: the clubs that spend the most on branding are often not the clubs that win the most. Conversely, the teams that build identity from the pitch — a playing style, an academy, a run of trophies — own the most durable brand. Identity cannot be outsourced.

A food brand can change its recipe, its packaging, its spokesperson without losing customers. A club that changes its identity loses itself. That is why short-term commercial deals in football often leave an empty feeling: they optimise a metric that is not on the league table.

I remember an evening in Manchester, rewatching footage after a derby, when a commercial director told me, "we don't sell football, we sell emotion". He was half right. Emotion is the product, but the supply of emotion is results. Without a goal in the 90th minute, there is no emotion to sell. That is something a tub of salsa never has to worry about.

This difference is not academic. It decides how a club allocates money. If the leadership believes the brand can be detached from results, they will spend on marketing, on content, on short-term commercial deals. If they understand that the brand is a consequence of results, they will spend on the academy, on squad depth, on things that only pay dividends after two or three seasons. Those two choices lead to two very different clubs after five years.

And this is where I have to be straight: I might be wrong.

In 2026, I wrote that a full-back was not worth 50 million pounds and the club would pay for it. They won the title with 100 points. People laughed at me over Walker. Three years later, they laughed until they cried over the price of defenders. I learned that data can be misread when I look at a single season instead of a cycle.

The same applies to football brands. I may be underestimating the speed of the industry. A few big clubs have proved that a brand can feed itself: commercial revenue rises, which drives recruitment, which drives results, which drives revenue again. That is a spiral, not a straight line. If that spiral is strong enough, the variable of competitive results could be replaced by the variable of brand scale.

My blind spot, if I have one, is the assumption that fans always respond to failure by walking away. In reality, they usually stay — and pay more. Loyalty in football is different from loyalty to a tub of salsa. It is built on memory, not on flavour. And memory cannot be bought with a marketing budget.

The question is no longer whether football should learn the branding formula of the consumer industry. It already has. The question is whether it remembers that its original product is made on the pitch, by 11 people, in 90 minutes that cannot be replayed. If a club forgets that, it may sell more shirts in one season — and lose the reason for someone to wear that shirt the next. I disagree not because I want to be different. I disagree because the majority was once wrong with me.